“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” he tweeted, linking to a Reuters article from last week citing a Twitter filing.
Monday Reads: America has a gun fetish that’s killing us
Posted: May 16, 2022 Filed under: abortion rights, Afternoon Reads, American Gun Fetish, Fox News, fundamentalist Christians, John Birch Society in Charge, Right Wing Angst, Ted "crusty" Cruz, the GOP, Ukraine 22 Comments
The Super Flower Blood Moon eclipse of 2022 over my house last night.
Good Day Sky Dancers!
I gaze through my Twitter feed which is loaded with all these photos of wipipo and their small army of indoctrinated children looking like they’re all about to head to The Aluminium Warehouse Church of the Almighty Dollar to get their sanctimony on or to everyone’s favorite store, movie theatre, or place of actual worship to slaughter the rest of us.
I’m trolling my stupid Senator again because he doesn’t seem to have any concept of being moral even though he throws bible verses on his feed day after day. Sometimes he sounds almost normal and then, he goes down the MAGA rabbit hole and sounds like a monster.
I am just sick of all the gun violence and white national terrorist violence and murder. I know I keep writing about it but folks like my one semi-cogent Senator are just fixated on all the wrong problems. For one, why do kids have access to dangerous weapons of war? For another, at what point do we start looking at Terrorist Manifestos and “news” broadcasts domestically and say this isn’t free speech, it is violent insurrection talking?
https://twitter.com/Jeannineyyyy/status/1525868372784717824
This is your basic child abuse. They look like a cult! And this is what their children grow up to do:
And this is your basic horrid policy. Let’s kill a lot of people by linking these two things together! And of course, let’s ignore gun violence even if you’re a doctor and every doctor’s organization calls it a Public Health Crisis.
Please read that thread from Sherrilyn Iffel. It’s enlightening. Please read this one too!!!
I’ve been caught in several shootouts in my neighborhood recently. The abandoned Naval Base is full of methheads and heroin addicts who come from the rural areas to the city. There are gunshots at least once a day. There have been at least 4 deaths there this month that are known around here from there. The police seem absolutely unable to do anything. Our crime wave is due to the long-ignored Opioid crisis. Why don’t we see some action there?
I grew up in a small Iowa town with a lot of people that had guns specifically for hunting. All I ever saw was the meat my dad would bring home when his friends shared their bounty. I have lived in this neighborhood for over 20 years and it was labeled as dangerous when I moved here. Well, the demographics have changed and the violence is appalling now. I’ll let you read between the lines. They are getting these ideas from one Party, from their Preachers, and from the likes of Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
Congressman Adam Schiff said it out loud. Fox News, Republicans, and white nationalist xtians are killing us and our democracy. There is no other way to look at this. They are after the rights of women, religious minorities, or the nonreligious, and they are after people of color and the GLBTQ community. It’s their way or we go to prison or they just turn their maladjusted little men on us with their tactical gear and semi-automatic weapons. OR, they let big Pharma loose to turn those little men into monsters.
And they send monsters to serve at the State and Federal levels who want the process to be rigged in their favor. Otherwise, they quit or go on Fox to howl like hyenas.
The number of proposed laws catering to one very small part of the Christian belief community is astounding. I just wished that a number of people heard those of us that experienced it from the 1980s forward and actually believed what we were saying. I was under attack as not being a ‘real’ Christian because I was a social justice Methodist at the time. One of my great grandfathers was a circuit rider in the Kansas/Oklahoma area doing just about the same thing as me so it’s a long tradition in my family.
Oh, and here are some pictures of my new Kitty Cristal who was rescued from the middle of neutral ground and is now happily installed on my bed. I’m hoping to distract you from all this distress with her as much as she is doing for me.
Democrats are generally disinclined to discuss religion, much less debate it.
They like to point out that Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin were famously atheist, Thomas Jefferson and dozens of other high-profile people in the founding generation were deists (a close cousin to atheists and certainly not Christians), and that in two different places the Constitution explicitly rejects religion interfering with government or vice versa.
But it’s time to discuss religion whether we like it or not, because it’s no longer knocking on our door: Sam Alito just sent it into the house with a no-knock warrant and stun grenades that threaten to catch the place on fire.
Alito’s Dobbs v. Jackson draft opinion rests on two main premises.
The first is that the Supreme Court has no business recognizing a “right” that isn’t rooted in the nation’s “history and tradition.”
This right-wing canard has been around for years, and has been used to argue against pretty much ever form of modernity from integrated public schools to, more recently, same-sex marriage. It’s a convenient pole around which you can twist pretty much any argument you want, because American history and tradition have been all over the map during the past roughly 240 years.
For example, Alito could just as easily have pointed out that there were no federal or state laws regulating abortion at all at the founding of our republic, and they didn’t really start showing up until the 1800s as physicians were clamoring for licensure to lock midwives out of birth-related medical practice (which included abortion).
The year Virginia got an abortion-regulating law, for example, was the same year — 1847 — that the American Medical Association was founded. Ben Franklin had been dead more than a half-century and not a single signer of the Declaration of Independence was still alive.
She sure sleeps better than I do!!
Read on. We’re in the dawning of the Age of DisReason and Religious tyranny. It’s back to the Middle Ages. We also know they are a well-armed bunch of Crusaders that have been whipped up into a frenzy by the Republican Party and Fox News. They also have plenty of playgrounds out on the Internet. They’ve been stacking courts since the Reagan years and look out!
And now, we have a fringe theory guiding yet another set of their reactionary movement. This is from the New York Times: “A Fringe Conspiracy Theory, Fostered Online, Is Refashioned by the G.O.P. Replacement theory, espoused by the suspect in the Buffalo massacre, has been embraced by some right-wing politicians and commentators.”
Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into the United States.
The next year, another white man, angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart, leaving 23 people dead, and later telling the police he had sought to kill Mexicans.
And in yet another deadly mass shooting, unfolding in Buffalo on Saturday, a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my own people.”
Three shootings, three different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now commonly known as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life, replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence.
But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations.
By his own account, the Buffalo suspect, Payton S. Gendron, followed a lonelier path to radicalization, immersing himself in replacement theory and other kinds of racist and antisemitic content easily found on internet forums, and casting Black Americans, like Hispanic immigrants, as “replacers” of white Americans. Yet in recent months, versions of the same ideas, sanded down and shorn of explicitly anti-Black and antisemitic themes, have become commonplace in the Republican Party — spoken aloud at congressional hearings, echoed in Republican campaign advertisements and embraced by a growing array of right-wing candidates and media personalities.
My Dog Temple has a new buddy.
We’ve always had ugly racist, anti-semite, white nationalist movements lurking about but now they’re weaponizing the first and second amendment against the majority. And of course, some Republicans are calling it a “false flag” operation which means this ugly ass young man was really a liberal. This Senator is a white nationalist. From HuffPo: “State Senator Who Backs White Nationalism Suggests Buffalo Shooting Was False Flag. Arizona GOP Sen. Wendy Rogers promoted a deranged conspiracy theory after 10 people were killed in what authorities say was a
A Republican state lawmaker with ties to white nationalists suggested the racially motivated mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket was staged by government agents.
“Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo,” Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers wrote on Telegram. The first-term lawmaker has built a national profile among far-right extremists with incendiary rhetoric, diehard support for former President Donald Trump and an embrace of white nationalism.Authorities said an 18-year-old white gunman traveled several hours on Saturday to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, where he opened fire outside at a supermarket. Thirteen people were shot; 10 died. Most were Black. The accused killer left a manifesto riddled with racist views and references to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that white Americans are being replaced by people of color, according to The New York Times.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been at war with campaign finance laws for more than a dozen years, stretching at least as far back as its decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010). On Monday, the Court’s six Republican appointees escalated this war.
The Court’s decision in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate is a boon to wealthy candidates. It strikes down an anti-bribery law that limited the amount of money candidates could raise after an election in order to repay loans they made to their own campaign.
Federal law permits candidates to loan money to their campaigns. In 2001, however, Congress prohibited campaigns from repaying more than $250,000 of these loans using funds raised after the election. They can repay as much as they want from campaign donations received before the election (although a federal regulation required them to do so “within 20 days of the election”).
The idea is that, if already-elected officials can solicit donations to repay what is effectively their own personal debt, lobbyists and others seeking to influence lawmakers can put money directly into the elected official’s pocket — and campaign donations that personally enrich a lawmaker are particularly likely to lead to corrupt bargains. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) manufactured a case to try to overturn that $250,000 limit, and now, the Court has sided with him.
Indeed, now that this limit on loan repayments has been struck down, lawmakers with sufficiently creative accountants may be able to use such loans to give themselves a steady income stream from campaign donors.
According to the Los Angeles Times, for example, Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA) made a $150,000 loan to her campaign at 18 percent interest in 1998 — before the 2001 law was enacted. Though Napolitano did eventually reduce the interest rate on this loan to 10 percent, the high-interest loan allowed her to make a considerable profit from donors.
Okay, there’s more about this shit but I can’t do it. Maybe BB will pick up on some of it tomorrow.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today!!
And love and snuggles from all of us at the kathouse! Here’s Ted Cruz with the Last Word today.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: May 14, 2022 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: abortion rights, cats relaxing, caturday, Clarence Thomas, January 6 Committee, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Republicans, Roe v. Wade, SCOTUS, Ukraine, women's rights 26 Comments
Liquid Cat, photo by Karen Slagle
Happy Caturday!!
My stress level is sky high lately. If only I could relax like a cat, blissfully unaware of the daily shocks we humans have to deal with these days. At least it’s the weekend, so maybe we’ll get a break–or maybe even some good news? Here’s the latest:
The Guardian: Demonstrators across the US protest expected reversal of Roe v Wade.
With the US supreme court apparently poised to overturn the 1973 landmark decision which made abortion legal, hundreds of thousands of people across America are planning to take to the streets to protest the looming decision.
A coalition of groups such as Planned Parenthood, UltraViolet, MoveOn and the Women’s March are organizing Saturday’s demonstrations, whose rallying cry is “Bans Off Our Bodies”. More than 370 protests are planned, including in Washington DC, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago….
The “Bans Off Our Bodies” gatherings will take place three days after Democrats in the US Senate on Wednesday made a largely symbolic effort to advance legislation that would codify the right to an abortion into federal law. All 50 Republicans and one conservative-aligned Democrat – West Virginia’s Joe Manchin – voted against the measure, leaving it well short of the 60 votes necessary for it to advance.
Also from The Guardian: Protesters rally outside US supreme court justices’ homes ahead of pro-choice marches.
Pro-choice demonstrators continue to turn up outside the homes of supreme court justices, with the latest target being conservative Amy Coney Barrett, who signed on to a majority draft opinion that was leaked to reveal an intention to overturn the constitutional right to seek an abortion in the US.
“The right to your own body – to do what you want with your own body – is the most personal freedom you can have,” one protester said from among a group wearing long red “handmaid” capes and white bonnets earlier this week to symbolize forced childbearing, as members of the Virginia state police watched nearby….
Several organizations, led by Planned Parenthood and the Women’s March, are preparing for a nationwide day of pro-choice marches on Saturday….
Protesters have so far gathered outside the residences in the Washington DC area of Samuel Alito, who wrote the scorching draft opinion, and Brett Kavanaugh, as well as Barrett and the chief justice, John Roberts, who did not sign on to the draft opinion, unlike the other three and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
Yesterday, British medical journal The Lancet released a scathing editorial warning the U.S. Supreme Court that if they overturn Roe v. Wade, they will have women’s “blood on their hands.”
The Lancet: Why Roe v. Wade Must Be Defended.
“Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” So begins a draft opinion by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, leaked from the US Supreme Court on May 2, 2022. If confirmed, this judgement would overrule the Court’s past decisions to establish the right to access abortion. In Alito’s words, “the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives”. The Court’s opinion rests on a strictly historical interpretation of the US Constitution: “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.” His extraordinary text repeatedly equates abortion with murder.
The Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution has been the main foundation underpinning the right of American women to an abortion. That 1868 Amendment was passed during the period of American Reconstruction, when states’ powers were being subjected to certain limitations. The goal of the Amendment was to prevent states from unduly restricting the freedoms of their citizens. That guarantee of personal liberty, so the Supreme Court had previously held, extended to pregnant women, with qualifications, who decided to seek an abortion. Alito rejected that reasoning. He argued that for any right not mentioned in the Constitution to be protected, it must be shown to have had deep roots in the nation’s history and tradition. Abortion does not fulfil that test. Worse, Roe was an exercise in “raw judicial power”, it “short-circuited the democratic process”, and it was “egregiously wrong” from the very beginning. It was now time, according to Alito, “to set the record straight”.
What is so shocking, inhuman, and irrational about this draft opinion is that the Court is basing its decision on an 18th century document ignorant of 21st century realities for women. History and tradition can be respected, but they must only be partial guides. The law should be able to adapt to new and previously unanticipated challenges and predicaments. Although Alito gives an exhaustive legal history of abortion, he utterly fails to consider the health of women today who seek abortion. Unintended pregnancy and abortion are universal phenomena. Worldwide, around 120 million unintended pregnancies occur annually. Of these, three-fifths end in abortion. And of these, some 55% are estimated to be safe—that is, completed using a medically recommended method and performed by a trained provider. This leaves 33 million women undergoing unsafe abortions, their lives put at risk because laws restrict access to safe abortion services.
Read the rest at the link.
At The Washington Post, Dana Millbank writes: Roe’s impending reversal is a 9/11 attack on America’s social fabric.
Washington’s reaction to the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade has been typically myopic.
Republicans first tried to make people believe that the issue wasn’t the opinion itself but the leak. Now they’re absurdly trying to portray Democrats as supporters of infanticide. Democrats, in turn, squabbled among themselves before a show vote on a doomed abortion rights bill. And the news media have reverted to our usual horse-race speculation about how it will affect the midterms.
This small-bore response misses the radical change to society that Justice Samuel Alito and his co-conspirators are poised to ram down the throats of Americans. Their stunning action might well change the course of the midterms — but more importantly, it is upending who we are as a people.
Assuming little changes from the draft, overturning Roe would be a shock to our way of life, the social equivalent of the 9/11 attacks (which shattered our sense of physical security) or the crash of 2008 (which undid our sense of financial security). As epoch-making decisions go, this is Brown v. Board of Education, but in reverse: taking away an entrenched right Americans have relied upon for half a century. We remember Brown because it changed us forever, not because it altered the 1954 midterms.
Read more at the WaPo.
Clarence Thomas, husband of Ginni Thomas, who supported a coup against the U.S. government, is still whining about the SCOTUS link, which most likely came from a right wing source. Adam Liptak at The New York Times: Justice Thomas Says Leaked Opinion Destroyed Trust at the Supreme Court.
The leak of a draft opinion has done irreparable damage to the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas said at a conference in Dallas on Friday night, adding that it had destroyed trust among its members.
“What happened at the court is tremendously bad,” Justice Thomas said. “I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them.”
The leak of the opinion, which would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion, was “like kind of an infidelity,” Justice Thomas said.
“Look where we are, where that trust or that belief is gone forever,” he said. “And when you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder.”
Tough shit. My trust in SCOTUS was gone after Thomas was confirmed by lying about his sexual harassment of Anita HIll.
I won’t quote from this one, but if you want to read an argument by a constitutional scholar who is a Democrat who supports abortion rights but opposes Roe, check out this article at The Wall Street Journal by Akhil Reed Amar: The End of Roe v. Wade. I found it interesting but not that helpful for women who are facing a disastrous and traumatic future around pregnancy and childbirth. The article wasn’t behind the paywall when I opened it.
In other news, Republican Senators refused to visit Ukraine with Democrats, but then they organized their own trip. Please note that one of their GOP colleagues, Rand Paul, is currently blocking a bill to provide more aid to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia. The New York Times: McConnell and other Republican senators make a secret visit to Ukraine.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, visited Ukraine on Saturday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky, leading the latest delegation of American lawmakers to the country as the United States deepens its commitment to Kyiv’s fight against the Russian invasion.
The surprise visit by Mr. McConnell, who was accompanied by three other Republican senators, comes as the Senate is working to pass a $40 billion emergency military and humanitarian aid package for Ukraine. It follows a string of other clandestine visits, including by the first lady, Jill Biden, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi….
“Helping Ukraine is not an instance of mere philanthropy — it bears directly on America’s national security and vital interests that Russia’s naked aggression not succeed and carries significant costs,” Mr. McConnell said this week. “If Ukraine fails to repel Russian aggression, there is no question that the threat to American and European security will grow.”
The trip was disclosed by Mr. Zelensky’s office. Details were not yet available from the lawmakers.
Mr. McConnell was joined by Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming, a member of his leadership team and the Foreign Relations Committee; John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the Intelligence Committee; and Susan Collins of Maine, who sits on both the Intelligence Committee and the Appropriations Committee, which oversees government funding.
In the photos I’ve seen, Zelensky doesn’t look as happy as he did when Jill Biden and Nancy Pelosi visited him.
The New York Times’s Luke Broadwater and Emily Cochrane on the subpoenas of members of Congress by the January 6th committee: Subpoenas for Republicans Raise New Questions for Jan. 6 Panel.
The decision by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to issue subpoenas to five Republican members of Congress, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, has sent a shock wave through Capitol Hill, heightening tensions in an already hostile environment and raising questions about the future of the inquiry and the institution itself.
The move by the Democratic-led panel set up a showdown with Republicans that could result in the threat of jail time against sitting members of Congress — including Mr. McCarthy, who is in line to be speaker if his party wins control of the House in November. It also had major implications for the investigation, and whether the country will ever get full answers about the deadly mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that disrupted the peaceful transfer of power and left more than 150 police officers injured.
Some Democrats immediately began clamoring for Mr. McCarthy and other lawmakers to be held in criminal contempt if they fail to appear at their scheduled depositions in late May, while Republicans warned of retaliation if they take control of the House after the midterm elections.
“I wouldn’t be for it, but turnabout is fair play,” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, said of retaliatory subpoenas. He called the Jan. 6 committee’s subpoenas a “horrible precedent for the institution,” adding: “It’s a race to the bottom.”
I’d say the refusal of Republicans and Trump associates to honor Congressional subpoenas looks bad for Republicans, especially if they try to investigate Democrats in the future; but for the NYT, it’s always about how everything that happens is bad for Democrats.
Meanwhile at Axios: More bombshells for Jan. 6 committee before June hearings.
The Jan. 6 committee may seek testimony from additional lawmakers as soon as next week, ahead of blockbuster TV hearings that kick off next month, Axios has learned.
Driving the news: Chiefs of staff and other aides to members of the House select committee were told Friday on their weekly call with committee staff to brace for more bombshells ahead of the June 9 start to public hearings, according to two sources on the call….
The big picture: The committee created a major stir with post-election implications when on Thursday it issued subpoenas to five House Republicans, including two of the GOP’s top brass — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
— Members haven’t said how they would enforce those subpoenas.
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the committee, told Axios on Thursday that “the fact-gathering process will continue through the hearings.”
What we’re hearing: A U.S. Capitol Police security briefing for members and their chiefs of staff, to prepare for the June hearings, is scheduled for May 20.
That’s what’s happening so far today, as I see it. What’s on your mind?
Friday Reads: Right-Wing Overreach Seems to Be Upon Us
Posted: May 13, 2022 Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Domestic terrorism, Voter Ignorance, white nationalists, Women's Rights 10 Comments
The Foxes (German: Die Füchse), 1913, Franz Marc.
Good Day Sky Dancers!
There are signs of backlash to moves by the Libertarian Right, the White Evangelical Nationalist Crusade, and the advance of global Fascism. They’re little signs mind you, but they are definitely there.
The major obvious overreach is the Putin invasion of Ukraine. But, we have some small hints that our markets and our political system may be waking up and pushing back.
Nothing made me happier today than to see the announcement I expected this morning after the crazy cryptocurrency market took a major dive and Tesla fell drastically. Nothing like a good dose of market discipline to kick a guy when he thinks he is winning. From WAPO: “Elon Musk tweeted that Twitter deal is temporarily on hold. The Tesla CEO, who has been seeking Twitter investors as his EV company sheds $400 billion in value, later says that he’s ‘still committed’ to the acquisition.”
I did mention a while ago that the entire thing could blow up in many different ways for many different reasons. Tesla has been overpriced for quite some time and cryptocurrency is basically a wild gamble no matter what they say about it. Sometimes, the favorite gets outfoxed.
Elon Musk tweeted early Friday that his $44 billion bid to buy Twitter was temporarily on hold, injecting fresh doubt into his ownership push just as a stock downturn had forced him to scramble for new investors.
Musk said the deal was on hold as he examined the number of spam accounts on the site, appearing to tie the delay to due diligence on an issue he has raised as a motivating factor to become Twitter’s owner. But the revelation sent the company’s stock down sharply, as investors signaled their doubt about whether the deal would go through.
Roughly two hours later, he added: “Still committed to acquisition.”
My guess is he’s looking for a reason to lower the offering price. My youngest daughter–the Market Maven–and I frequently discuss that we do not understand the demand for cryptocurrency. My Brother-in-law who also has been into investing for some time and is a Tax Attorney/CPA sneers at it too. I just come at it as a Financial Economist who believes currency needs to be backed up by actual production and a country’s laws. Maybe, I’m seriously old-fashioned. The last time I heard all the crypto bots tweet “To the Moon” I realized a crash was on the horizon for them. My jaded attitudes based on too-good-to-be-true have served me well in every market crash I’ve lived through. I bail. New York Magazine has this headline: “The Crash of Crypto’s Perpetual Wealth Machine” written by Kevin T. Dugan.
Just about four months ago, billionaire and Wall Street legend Mike Novogratz went to a Brooklyn tattoo parlor a few blocks down from Jim Cramer’s bar and, at 58, made permanent his devotion to a speculative new cryptocurrency. The result, on his left arm, was a large wolf howling at the moon. “I’m officially a Lunatic!!!” he tweeted to his more than 400,000 followers.
The ink refers to Luna, one half of a duo of digital currencies that were supposed to act as a perpetual wealth-creation machine, a way to always make money through the magic of code and financial engineering. At the time, Luna was on a massive run, up more the 1,000 percent over the prior six months. Novogratz is known as much for his career in the buttoned-up world of high finance — he’s an ex-partner at Goldman Sachs and Fortress Investment Group, an investor who lost two ten-figure fortunes and is on his third — as for being someone who has chafed against those boundaries. Several years ago, he was among the first high-profile Establishment finance types to dive all-in on crypto. (The ex-Princeton wrestler also hired Hilary Duff to play at his birthday party a few years ago.) But even for Novogratz, the tattoo seemed a little over-the-top. When someone tweeted their bewilderment that Novogratz would have gone so far, Do Kwon, the creator of Luna, chimed in, unprompted: “don’t worry it wasn’t much.”
This week, though, the critics who warned that Kwon’s perpetual wealth machine was too good to be true and that Novogratz might come to regret that tattoo before long were vindicated when Luna and its partner coin, Terra, both imploded in spectacular fashion. Terra is supposed to be trade reliable at the value of exactly one U.S. dollar, but it plummeted to 29 cents on Wednesday morning. Luna was down 99 percent since its highs last month. More than $40 billion in wealth — no small part of it from retail investors — was gone in a matter of hours. The shock of the sudden collapse sent the price of bitcoin falling to its lowest point since July, exposing how a coin labeled a Ponzi scheme by its critics had impacted the larger market in digital assets. Meanwhile, shares in leading U.S.-based crypto exchange Coinbase were off by 25 percent, and the trillion-dollar-plus crypto industry is teeming with rumors about large funds or companies that may be on the brink of failure.
Le Petit Prince et le renard, Antione de Saint Exupery,1943
Does this sound like a rational market to you?
The Oil and Gas Industry is also overreaching which caused me to once more troll one of my senators on Twitter. This is what’s going on and the Oil and Gas Industry is once more outfoxing the people who are supposed to regulate their failed oligopoly market so they can’t restrict quantity or price fix. From Time: “Oil Companies Posted Huge Profits. Here’s Where The Cash Will Go (Hint: Not Climate).” Nor is its goal the production of more gas and oil. They are perfectly happy with the high prices.
As consumers grapple with high fuel prices and politicians scramble to knock them down, oil companies are not making any sudden moves. That’s because, after years of low fuel prices, they are now enjoying a financial upswing, as demonstrated by lucrative first quarter earnings reports released in late April and early May.
Oil prices started to creep up in late 2021 due to supply constraints, but then turbocharged after Russia invaded Ukraine in February. For Chevron, the upshot was $6.3 billion in profits last quarter, up from $1.4 billion a year ago. For Exxon Mobil, profits more than doubled in the same period, to $5.5 billion. The numbers were also rosy for European firms—even among those that took a hit from severing ties with their Russian investments. TotalEnergies, a French company, netted nearly $5 billion, a 48% boost from last year, while U.K. companies Shell (at $9 billion) and BP (at $6.2 billion) are hitting profit levels that they haven’t seen in about a decade.
For the most part, major oil companies aren’t going to pour these billions of dollars into climate-mitigation investments like carbon capture technologies. Nor have they signaled any immediate intention to bolster oil production, despite calls from heads of state to do so. Their inaction has spurred U.S. and European countries, which are under pressure to keep fuel affordable, to release oil reserves and replace Russian crude oil and liquid natural gas from other sources. Despite those government efforts, oil prices have stayed above $100 per barrel, sustaining an influx of money to fossil fuel companies that are passing it on to stockholders and investors in the form of increased dividends and share buyback initiatives that drive up companies’ share values.
One analysis from the Wall Street Journal found that the nine largest U.S. oil producers spent 54% more in share repurchases and dividends in the first quarter than they invested in new oil developments. Similarly, a recent report covering the 20 largest U.S. oil companies published by the environmentalist organization Friends Of The Earth and consumer watchdog organizations Public Citizen and BailoutWatch, tallied $56 billion in new share buyback authorizations in the roughly seven months since last October, compared with $11 billion announced in the nine months before that.
I think they’re being deliberately political and obtuse about this. It’s also not helpful because they could solve this problem by passing laws. They are stopping oil production. You are letting them Senator by not forcing them to produce or give up their damned excessive profits to an extraordinary income or price gouging tax.
So, it looks like Republicans are going to be bringing more guys like this one to the ballot in the fall midterms. More power to them. I’m not sure any rational voter of either part is going to want more of this guy. From Politico: “‘He’s Not OK’: The Entirely Predictable Unraveling of Madison Cawthorn. A string of embarrassing incidents has led many to question whether the young congressman from North Carolina was really ready for the job.” The little dude is not an outlier. Ask his Maga Buddies in Congress now subpoenaed by the Jan 6 committee.
Four and a half years after Cawthorn contemplated suicide, he was running for Congress. Turning a stirring story of conquering adversity into a shocking political victory, he achieved his most ambitious career goal at a staggeringly early age. And within weeks if not days of being sworn in — at 25 years old one of the youngest members in the history of the House — he had put himself on a short list of the chamber’s most known figures. Now, though, heading into his first reelection, Cawthorn is mired in controversy, facing the very real possibility that the end of his electoral career might come as quickly as it began. Emboldened by Cawthorn’s miscues, misdeeds and array of indiscretions, seven Republican challengers have lined up to try to take him out in Tuesday’s primary, party leaders have abandoned him, and other MAGA firebrands are keeping their distance what with the escalating storm of even just the past few months.
Police stopped him for driving with a revoked license (again). Airport security stopped him for trying to bring a gun onto a plane (again). He made outlandish and unsubstantiated comments on an obscure podcast about orgies and cocaine use by his Capitol Hill colleagues. He called the Ukrainian president a “thug,” he suggested Nancy Pelosi was an alcoholic (she doesn’t drink), and the seemingly ceaseless gush of unsavory news has included allegations of insider trading, pictures of shuttered district offices, a leaked tranche of salacious images and videos, and ongoing proof in FEC filings that he’s a prodigious fundraiser but a profligate spender as well. All of this comes on top of multiple women in multiple places accusing him of sexual harassment, his role in the insurrection on Jan. 6 of last year, his growing catalogue of alarming provocations on social media and on the House floor, and his politically imprudent decision to announce he was switching districts only to reverse course. His marriage amidst all this lasted less than a year.
Common foxes in the snow, 1893,Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Kuhner
Seems a lot like Gaetz, Jordan, Taylor Greene, and others except they didn’t spill the beans on the Grand Old Pervert’s Orgies and Cocaine parties. Then there’s the Hand Maid on the Supreme Court. Move on, she’s perfectly normal too right?
Check out this in The Atlantic by Margaret Atwood. “I INVENTED GILEAD. THE SUPREME COURT IS MAKING IT REAL. I thought I was writing fiction in The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Although I eventually completed this novel and called it The Handmaid’s Tale, I stopped writing it several times, because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?
For instance: It is now the middle of 2022, and we have just been shown a leaked opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States that would overthrow settled law of 50 years on the grounds that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution, and is not “deeply rooted” in our “history and tradition.” True enough. The Constitution has nothing to say about women’s reproductive health. But the original document does not mention women at all.
Women were deliberately excluded from the franchise. Although one of the slogans of the Revolutionary War of 1776 was “No taxation without representation,” and government by consent of the governed was also held to be a good thing, women were not to be represented or governed by their own consent—only by proxy, through their fathers or husbands. Women could neither consent nor withhold consent, because they could not vote. That remained the case until 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, an amendment that many strongly opposed as being against the original Constitution. As it was.
Women were nonpersons in U.S. law for a lot longer than they have been persons. If we start overthrowing settled law using Justice Samuel Alito’s justifications, why not repeal votes for women?
Reproductive rights have been the focus of the recent fracas, but only one side of the coin has been visible: the right to abstain from giving birth. The other side of that coin is the power of the state to prevent you from reproducing. The Supreme Court’s 1927 Buck v. Bell decision held that the state may sterilize people without their consent. Although the decision was nullified by subsequent cases, and state laws that permitted large-scale sterilization have been repealed, Buck v. Bell is still on the books. This kind of eugenicist thinking was once regarded as “progressive,” and some 70,000 sterilizations—of both males and females, but mostly of females—took place in the United States. Thus a “deeply rooted” tradition is that women’s reproductive organs do not belong to the women who possess them. They belong only to the state.
Alito of the poison pen is “reluctant to discuss state of Supreme Court after Roe leak” according to the Washington Post. Do you think he enjoys being the most hated man in America?
In his first public address since the explosive leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion he wrote that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. breezed through a detailed examination of statutory textualism, and renewed a disagreement over the court’s decision saying federal discrimination law protects gay and transgender workers.
But he was a little stumped by the final audience question from a crowd at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University: Are he and the other justices at a place where they could get a nice meal together?
“I think it would just be really helpful for all of us to hear, personally, are you all doing okay in these very challenging times?” the questioner asked.
The fact that Alito was speaking via closed circuit from a room at the Supreme Court seven miles away, rather than in person, was a sign these are not normal times.
Foxes, Kawanabe Kyosai
The snowflake can’t even handle his neighbors serving wine and cheese plates and opening their home bathrooms to protestors by his house. They needed a law to protect him from a cocktail get-together with a point? What did he think would happen? That 60% of the population was going to take his little diatribe based on a guy that believed in and killed witches? And he was at fucking George Mason which barely qualified as an educational institution and is more like an indoctrination center that teaches false narratives and pogrom generator.
What about the overreach of the White Nationalists and Militias that stormed the Capitol and January 6. Ever wonder what a nightmare it would be to be raised by one or married to one? What sense of relief you must feel to find your violent and manipulative father/husband in federal prison!
You may read the stories of the three grown kids of Steward Rhodes at The Southern Poverty Law Center.
Prosecutors’ most recent allegations against Rhodes include that he attempted to contact then-President Donald Trump through an intermediary in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. They further alleged that Rhodes, in a conference call with Oath Keepers members in the days following Trump’s election defeat, characterized Trump’s opponents as a cabal of pedophiles.
In February, Hatewatch met with and interviewed Rhodes’ adult children: son Dakota Adams, 24, and daughters Sedona Adams, 23, and Sequoia Adams, 19, in Kalispell, Montana. Rhodes and his ex-wife, Tasha Adams, have three other children who are still minors, and are not included in this interview.
The conversation shed important new light on the psychology of the Oath Keepers founder and provided the untold story of the impact of his public activities on his family.
The more these stories get out, the more outraged the sane majority in this country should be convinced that voting Democratic is our only hope. Even, if that party isn’t exactly the party that stands up for right, we have no other rational choice.
What’s on your writing and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads
Posted: May 12, 2022 Filed under: just because 21 CommentsGood Morning!!
We have passed another horrific milestone in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. One million Americans have now died from the virus. ABC News: ‘Unthinkable tragedy’: U.S. COVID-19 death toll surpasses 1 million.
One million Americans have now died from the coronavirus, according to an announcement made Thursday by President Joe Biden, marking a long-dreaded milestone for an incomprehensible tragedy.
“Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19. One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic. Jill and I pray for each of them,” Biden said in a statement. “As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow. To heal, we must remember.” [….]
Over the last two years, the deadly virus has kept the nation tightly in its clutch, with wave after wave of the virus washing over with only relatively brief respites in between.
“This unthinkable tragedy will forever appear in the history books,” said John Brownstein, Ph.D. an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
The loss of 1 million lives is a reality that is still difficult for many to comprehend, and to accept. In some respects, the death toll remains hidden from view.
Experts said the statistic, however massive, does not fully capture the magnitude of the human tragedy.
“It’s one thing to talk about numbers, but then to realize that each one of those numbers represents a grandparent or a spouse or someone with their own unique story that we’ve lost. Already over a million of those stories in you know, in this country alone — it really is a tragedy and a tragedy, in many ways, of unprecedented proportions,” Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told ABC News.
CNN: Biden mourns 1 million US Covid deaths as ‘irreplaceable losses.
President Joe Biden on Thursday mourned 1 million American deaths from Covid-19, using the occasion to again urge Congress to pass additional funding to control the pandemic.
While other official tallies have placed the figure a bit short of that mark, Biden marked the moment during the White House’s latest virtual Global Covid-19 Summit, reflecting on the pandemic’s devastation on the nation after more than two years.
“This pandemic isn’t over. Today, we mark a tragic milestone here in the United States — 1 million Covid deaths. One million empty chairs around the family dinner table. Each irreplaceable, irreplaceable losses. Each leaving behind a family, a community, forever changed because of this pandemic. Our hearts go out to all those who are struggling,” Biden said during his opening remarks at the summit, later acknowledging that “around the world, many more millions have died” as a result of the pandemic.
“That’s why I continue to call on Congress here at home to take the urgent action to provide emergency Covid-19 funding that is vital to protect Americans to make sure we’re that we maintain our supplies of Covid-19 test treatments and vaccines, including next generation vaccines that are being developed,” he said, later highlighting the request’s $5 billion proposal “to keep up our global partnership in the fight against Covid-19.”
In a proclamation issued Thursday ordering flags to be flown at half-staff to mark the milestone, Biden wrote that the nation “must not grow numb to such sorrow.”
Thursday’s summit is aimed at “redoubling” efforts to control Covid-19 and preparing the world for future variants of the coronavirus or the next deadly pandemic, two senior administration officials said.
The event, which is also co-hosted by Germany, Indonesia, Senegal and Belize, is calling for countries to invest in the new Global Pandemic Preparedness and Health Security fund at the World Bank, and the US announced that its pledge will increase to $450 million, up from the initially promised amount of $250 million. The summit will also highlight an additional $3.1 billion in new funding commitments from countries around the world to combat Covid-19.
Have you heard about what happened to a women’s lacrose team from Delaware State University, an HBCU? It’s pretty shocking. FYI, I had to register to read this story: A Bus Carrying an HBCU’s Lacrosse Team Was Pulled Over. Deputies Searched It for Drugs.
The president of a historically Black university says he is “incensed” that the institution’s women’s lacrosse team was subjected to a “trying and humiliating” traffic stop in Georgia, where law enforcement used a minor traffic violation as an opportunity to search the students’ belongings for narcotics.
Nothing illegal was found, and coaches and members of the Delaware State University team — the majority of whom are Black — have spoken out about the experience in the days since, describing the stop-and-search as racial profiling and a frightening ordeal.
“We do not intend to let this or any other incident like it pass idly by. We are prepared to go wherever the evidence leads us,” President Tony Allen of Delaware State University wrote in a letter to the campus community. “We have video. We have allies. Perhaps more significantly, we have the courage of our convictions.” Allen also noted that he’s reached out to Georgia law enforcement and that he’s exploring “options for recourse — legal and otherwise.” [….]
The April 20 Delaware State incident was first reported last week by Sydney Anderson, a sophomore who was on the bus when deputies from the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office stopped the vehicle as it traveled north on I-95, taking the team back to campus after several games in Florida.
In The Hornet Newspaper, Anderson wrote thatthe incident was traumatic, especially for those who’d never had an encounter with the police before, and called it one of the “constant reminders of being Black in America.”
During a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, Sheriff William Bowman of Liberty County, who is Black, told reporters that the deputies didn’t know that the bus was carrying students from a historically Black university before they entered the vehicle, nor did the sherriff’s office realize the incident had been perceived as racial profiling.
Obviously, that is not true.
The Delaware State lacrosse players’ bus was pulled over about two and a half hours after the team left its hotel on the morning of April 20, Head Coach Pamella Jenkins said in an interview with The Chronicle. A police officer came to the door and asked the driver for his license and registration, saying commercial vehicles aren’t supposed to drive in the left lane.
Nobody on board thought much about it until one of the students noticed the officers pulling their luggage out from underneath the bus to search it, with the help of a drug-sniffing dog, Jenkins said.
Video footage taken by one of the players shows two white officers standing at the front of the bus as players and coaches look on. One of the officers can be heard saying, “If there is anything in y’all’s luggage, we’re probably gonna find it. … I’m not looking for a little bit of marijuana, but I’m pretty sure you guys chaperones probably gonna be disappointed if we find any.”
“I was definitely scared,” Jenkins said. “As a coach, especially traveling away from campus, I’m responsible for them and their safety, and in the moment, I felt helpless.” She credited the students for their level heads in face of an uncertain situation. “My hope was to just stay calm, stay quiet, so that they could do what they needed to do so that we could hurry up and get back to campus.”
Shortly after informing the students and coaches of their search, one of the deputies returned with a wrapped gift addressed to one of the players and asked what was inside. Jenkins said the student told the deputy that she didn’t know because it was a gift from a relative that she’d been told not to open until she got home. To this, the deputy said he would open the package off the bus but she would need to step off if it was anything that warranted discussion. The deputy returned a few minutes later and said they were free to go.
More reads on this incident:
Yahoo Sports: Sheriff falsely claims deputies didn’t search luggage during HBCU lacrosse bus stop in Georgia.
CNN: Lacross team claims racial profiling by Georgia deputies during traffic stop.
NPR: Delaware AG asks for federal civil rights review after HBCU team stopped by police.
Yesterday, Republicans and one “Democrat” in the Senate defeated a bill to protect abortion rights. Could Democrats be getting angry enough to really fight back against GOP misogyny and lies? Here’s what women from the House of Representatives did before what they knew would be a losing vote:
And check out this rant from Rep. Hakeem Jeffries:
The Hill: Hakeem Jeffries to Clarence Thomas: ‘Why are you such a hater?’
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) this week blasted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for his stance on a number of issues facing the court, including abortion rights.
“Let me ask this question of brother Thomas,” Jeffries said during a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week. “Why are you such a hater? Hate on civil rights. Hate on women’s rights. Hate on reproductive rights. Hate on voting rights. Hate on marital rights. Hate on equal protection under the law. Hate on liberty and justice for all. Hate on free and fair elections. Why are you such a hater?”
Jeffries added the senior conservative justice “thinks he can get away with” his stances on those key issues and “escape public scrutiny.” [….]
Thomas is one of several conservatives on the court who has indicated, according to a leaked draft opinion published earlier this month, that they would rule in favor of a Mississippi state law on abortion that would directly overturn Roe v. Wade, which made abortion a federally protected right.
“We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like,” Thomas said last week in response to public outcry over the court’s reported stance. “We use stare decisis as a mantra when we don’t want to think.”
Jeffries referenced Thomas’s comments, telling the justice to “start in your own home.”
“Have a conversation with Ginni Thomas. She refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Why?” the congressman said. “Because she didn’t like the outcome. Because the former twice-impeached so-called president of the United States lost legitimately to Joe Biden. How did she respond? Instead, she said the Bidens should face a military tribunal in Guantánamo Bay on trumped-up charges of sedition. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Joe Biden sounds fired up too.
This is from Politico: ‘The great MAGA king’: Biden sharpens midterm attacks.
The president traveled the country on Wednesday, sharpening his lines of attack against the Republican Party as primary season kicks into full gear. Throughout the day, he laid into the GOP and baited former President Donald Trump, even testing a new nickname for his predecessor: the great MAGA king.
“Look at my predecessor, the great MAGA king — the deficit increased every single year he was president,” Biden said in Chicago at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers International convention, contrasting the deficit reductions during his tenure with Trump’s term.
With a little over six months to go until the November midterms — what is often a referendum on the president’s performance — Biden is moving into full-fledged campaign mode. The noticeable change in tone comes as economic concerns hover over Democrats’ prospects and the White House tests out a new strategy — painting a clear picture of the differences between Democrats and Trump and his followers.
With his MAGA king nickname, Biden was just getting started. At a DNC fundraiser later Wednesday, the president called his 2020 victory against Trump a “low bar,” and dug into his favorite phrase of late, “MAGA Republicans,” twice calling these politicians “petty,” “mean-spirited” and “extreme.”
“They are cowered by Trump,” Biden said, telling the audience that Democrats have to make their case in 2022. “The fact of the matter is, they run the show — the MAGA Republicans. … It really is beyond the pale.”
The president, speaking to roughly 40 guests, said the GOP has a “radical agenda” and said it isn’t “your father’s Republican Party.”
What’s on your mind today? What stories are you following?
Tuesday Reads
Posted: May 10, 2022 Filed under: just because 21 Comments
William Merritt Chase, Afternoon by the Sea
Good Afternoon!!
Chris Coons, so-called Democratic Senator from Delaware, worked with Texas Senator John Cornyn to introduce a bill to protect the families of Supreme Court justices from scary peaceful demonstrations against their efforts to turn American women into broodmares. Coons could be working to protect women from Republicans who want them to loose their constitutional rights, but apparently that’s not important to him.
The Hill: Senate passes security bill for Supreme Court family members.
The Senate on Monday easily cleared a bill to extend security protections to the immediate family members of Supreme Court justices.
The bill — spearheaded by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) — passed the Senate by unanimous consent, meaning all 100 senators had to sign off in order for it to pass without a formal vote.
It still now heads to the House for passage.
“Threats to the physical safety of Supreme Court Justices and their families are disgraceful, and attempts to intimidate and influence the independence of our judiciary cannot be tolerated,” Cornyn said in a statement.
“I’m glad the Senate quickly approved this measure to extend Supreme Court police protection to family members, and the House must take up and pass it immediately,” he added.
Coons, in a statement, said that he was “glad to see this bipartisan bill unanimously pass the Senate in order to extend security protection to the families of Supreme Court members.”
Have there been “threats to the physical safety” of SCOTUS justices and their families? I haven’t seen it reported in the media. It seems to me that the people whose physical safety is threatened are women of childbearing age and their families. Apparently not. WTF?!
Chris Coons on getting rid the filibuster and reaction after SCOTUS leak at Raw Story:
After supporting Harry Reid’s filibuster reform as a freshman senator, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) later wished he could take it back. But there are no take backs in Congress.
“I have come over time to regret…changing the rules,” Coons told his colleagues from the Senate floor back in 2017, right before McConnell and Republicans followed Democrat’s lead and destroyed the filibuster so they could swiftly seat Neil Gorsuch on the court.
Last week, after the leak-heard-round-the-world, Coons rebuffed Raw Story’s question about filibuster reform, regret, and Roe v. Wade.
“I’m sorry. I’m out of energy. I’m out of time. I’m tired. Leave me alone,” Coons said.
Fuck you Coons!! And this guy is supposedly close to President Biden.
https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1524059677457367040?s=20&t=tze7gAxvbQsLCJipFeUfPg
Here are the scary protesters on Sam Alito’s street.
Catherine Rampell usually writes about economic issues, but today she has a column on abortion rights.
The Washington Post: These GOP politicians aren’t pro-life. They’re pro-forced birth.
Republican politicians working to overturn Roe v. Wade say they are pro-life and antiabortion. In fact, they are neither. What they are is pro-forced birth.
This distinction is about more than semantics. These officials have drawn a clear line, as evidenced by policies they’ve adopted in conjunction with their opposition to Roe. GOP-led states are making choices, today, that increase the chances of unplanned pregnancies and, therefore, demand for abortions; their choices also limit access to health care and other critical programs for new moms, endangering the lives and welfare of mothers and their children.
Mother and Child, Mary Cassatt
Consider Mississippi.
It was a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks that has set the stage for the Supreme Court to roll back nearly 50 years of reproductive rights. If the court does overturn Roe, as a leakeddraft decision suggests it soon will, another Mississippi law would automatically “trigger,” banning nearly all abortions.
Some residents who find themselves with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy might be able to leave the state to seek an abortion. But others without the means to travel or take time off from work will be forced to give birth. And in Mississippi, that is an unusually dangerous undertaking.
Here’s why that is:
The United States has the highest maternal death rate in the developed world; Mississippi has one of the higher maternal death rates within the United States. The odds are worse for Black women, whose risk of death related to pregnancy and childbirth are nearly triple those for White women in the state.
Mississippi also has the country’s highest infant mortality and child poverty rates.
Mississippi’s legislature recently considered whether to extend Medicaid postpartum coverage from 60 days to a full year after birth, as federal law newly allows states to do. If you care about the lives of new moms (and, by extension, their kids), this is a no-brainer. Roughly 6 in 10 births in the state are covered by Medicaid; 86 percent of the state’s maternal deaths occur postpartum. Pregnancy and delivery raise the risk of many health complications, including infections, blood clots, high blood pressure, heart conditions and postpartum depression. Giving low-income moms access to health care a full year after birth would save lives.
But Mississippi’s Republican leadership rejected the proposal. Not because the state lacks the funds (which would be partly covered by the federal government); one thing state pols did manage to get through this session was the state’s largest-ever tax cut.
Janet Yellen has weighed in on the abortion issue.
Politico: Yellen: Banning abortion would be ‘very damaging’ to U.S. economy.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday argued that banning abortion would be “very damaging” for the economy by reducing women’s ability to balance their careers and their families.
“I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” she said in response to a question at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.
In her comments, Yellen said the 1973 ruling helped allow women to finish school and increase their earning potential, leading to higher participation in the workforce.
Research also shows that it had a favorable impact on the well-being and earnings of children,” she said. “There are many research studies that have been done over the years looking at the economic impacts of access or lack thereof to abortion, and it makes clear that denying women access to abortion increases their odds of living in poverty or need for public assistance.”
According to a new poll by Yahoo News/YouGov: Confidence in Supreme Court has collapsed since conservatives took control.
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that Americans’ confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has collapsed over the last 20 months — a period that began with former President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans installing a 6-3 conservative majority ahead of the 2020 election and culminated last week with the leak of a draft opinion signaling that five GOP-appointed justices plan to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The last time Yahoo News/YouGov asked about confidence in the court was in September 2020, a few days after liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and a few days before Trump nominated conservative jurist Amy Coney Barrett to replace her.
Back then, 70% of registered voters said they had either “some” (50%) or “a lot” (20%) of confidence in the court, and 30% said they had either “a little” (23%) or “none” (7%).
But the new survey of 1,577 U.S. adults, which was conducted immediately after the leak, found that registered voters have swung from mostly having confidence in the Supreme Court — by a colossal 40-point margin — to being evenly split on the question.
Today, just half of voters still express some (37%) or a lot (14%) of confidence in the court, while the other half now expresses either a little (24%) or none (26%).
And among all Americans — as opposed to just registered voters — most (53%) now say they have either no confidence in the Supreme Court (28%) or only a little (25%).
Mother and Child, Pablo Picasso
As usual, Trump’s negative influence on U.S. politics is in news. A journalist whose family arrived in Nebraska in 1856 weighs in on the damage Trump has done to the state.
Ted Genaways at The New York Times: How Trump Helped Transform Nebraska Into a Toxic Political Wasteland.
LINCOLN, Neb. — In the old days, Charles W. Herbster, a cattle baron and bull semen tycoon who used his fortune and influence to get into Donald Trump’s good graces, almost certainly would have been forced to pull out of Nebraska’s Republican primary for governor by now. In recent weeks, eight women, including a state senator, have come forward to allege that Mr. Herbster groped them at various Republican events or at beauty pageants at which he was a judge.
But this is post-shame, post-“Access Hollywood” America, so Mr. Trump traveled to Nebraska last week for a rally at the I-80 Speedway between Lincoln and Omaha to show his continued support for Mr. Herbster. “He is innocent of these despicable charges,” Mr. Trump said. And Mr. Herbster, in true Trump fashion, has not only denied the allegations but also filed a defamation suit against one of his accusers and started running a television ad suggesting that the claims are part of a political conspiracy.
Mr. Herbster sees conspiracies everywhere — conspiracies to destroy him, conspiracies to undermine Mr. Trump, conspiracies to unravel the very fabric of the nation. “This country is in a war within the borders of the country,” he told the crowd at the Starlite Event Center in Wahoo on Thursday, a few days before Tuesday’s primary election. Over more than an hour, Mr. Herbster, dressed in his trademark cowboy hat and vest, unspooled a complex and meandering tale of the threat to America, interspersed with labyrinthine personal yarns and long diatribes about taxes.
It was convoluted but (as best I can understand) goes something like this: The coronavirus was manufactured in a lab in China and released into the United States in early 2020 by “illegals” from Mexico who were also smuggling Chinese-made fentanyl across the border. One of the smugglers, he said, had enough fentanyl in a single backpack to kill the entire population of Nebraska and South Dakota. The goal of this two-pronged attack, he explained, was to create a panic, stoked by Facebook and $400 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, to justify allowing voting by mail. Then, through unspecified means, the Chinese government used those mail-in ballots to steal the election — though Mr. Herbster hates that word. “They didn’t ‘steal’ it,” he told the crowd, his finger raised. “Do not use that terminology. They did not ‘steal’ it. They rigged it.”
Read more at the NYT link.
Woman and child on the balcony, Berthe Morisot
Former acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper is still making the rounds to sell his book. Here are his latest revelations about Trump.
Business Insider: Trump wanted to court-martial the retired Navy SEAL who led the bin Laden raid for criticizing him, former defense chief says.
Former President Donald Trump wanted to take the extraordinary step of reactivating retired US Navy Adm. William McRaven so that he could court-martial the former Navy SEAL commander for criticizing him, Trump’s former Pentagon chief claims in his new book.
Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper writes that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had to talk then-President Trump out of a plan to recall both retired US Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal and McRaven to active duty as a way to open the two former senior military officers up to court-martial proceedings.
“Doing this ‘will backfire on you, Mr. President,’ we said,” Esper wrote of a May 2020 meeting in his book, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times,” which is out today.
Trump told Esper and Milley that McRaven and McChrystal were “so disloyal” because of what he thought they were doing and had said about him. Esper writes that Trump “was spun up” by media stories in Breitbart claiming that McChrystal was advising Democrats on how to use artificial intelligence to “track down and counter Trump supporters.”
Also from Business Insider: Trump was the ‘biggest leaker of all’ in his administration and it was ‘generally bad’ for the country, his former Pentagon chief says.
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper in his new book said that “leaks were a chronic problem” in the Trump administration and former President Donald Trump was the “biggest leaker of all.”
“The individual motivations for the leaks ranged from advancing a preferred policy outcome to enhancing the leaker’s own role or credentials to currying favor with the president. It was a noxious behavior learned from the top. The president was the biggest leaker of all. It turned colleague against colleague, department against department, and it was generally bad for the administration and the country,” Esper wrote in “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times.”
Esper said the leaks “damaged trust” and made people “far more reluctant to speak up and share their views.”
“Nobody wanted to see their name in the morning news, especially when the words were so often twisted, misinterpreted, and taken out of context,” he added. “In the Trump administration, this could get you blacklisted or fired.”
One more Trump-related story from The Daily Beast: OAN Finally Admits ‘No Widespread Voter Fraud’ After Settling Defamation Suit.
The right-wing cable network One America News Network on Monday ran a pre-recorded 30-second segment acknowledging that there was “no widespread voter fraud” by Georgia election workers in the 2020 presidential election. The segment appears to be part of a recent settlement relating to a defamation lawsuit brought against the network by two such workers.
The segment notes that an investigation by state officials into unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud made by ex-President Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani turned up nothing. “The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct,” a narrator states.
“A legal matter with this network and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement,” the voiceover adds.
Mother and children, William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Freeman and her daughter, Moss, say they were harassed online and in person after baseless rumors began circulating online, due in part to content published by the conspiracy website The Gateway Pundit, which the pair also sued.
In January 2021, when Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to try to “find” votes to overturn the state’s election results, he mentioned Freeman’s name 18 times. Freeman was also visited by a publicist for Kanye West, who threatened her in an effort to extract a confession about committing election fraud.
And if that weren’t enough, video of the pair doing their jobs was hyped up by Rudy Giuliani—and Sean Hannity—who falsely claimed that it showed “blatant, clear, obvious” fraud. While speaking to Georgia State House Republicans about the video during a Zoom meeting in December 2020, Giuliani at one point can be heard saying, “We should try to get this on Newsmax and OANN.”
Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani as well, and that case is ongoing.
That’s it for me. What stories are you following today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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