Mostly Monday Reads: The Numbers Game

Posted: November 14, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , | 12 Comments

Transverse Line, Wassily Kandinsky, 1923

Good Day Sky Dancers!

Ballots are still being counted in the 2022 Midterms. The Senate has only one race that will go to a runoff. That is the Georgia race between Herschel Walker and incumbent Senator Ralph Warnock.  The dynamics of this race may change since the majority status has been decided.  Folks may decide to stay home rather than support Walker, who is definitely an odd choice for what used to be the severe and staid part of Congress. There is a general feeling that the Republicans will take the House, albeit by a very slim margin.

Fordham Professor Jed Shugerman, writing on mastodon, believes that 3 Roberts court’s decisions had much to do with the House outcome.

Some reasons why GOP will win the House:
1. Roberts Court decision Rucho allowing partisan gerrymandering.
2. Roberts Court decision Shelby County striking down preclearance in the Voting Rights Act.
3. Roberts Court shadow docket blocking Black districts in AL & LA (@mcpli)

The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood, 1907, Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

The Louisiana case definitely helped since the non-gerrymandered congressional districts would’ve added an additional black Congressman who would undoubtedly be a Democratic Party member.  This would have been a pick-up. Currently, 205 seats have been called for the Democratic Party and 212 for Republicans. The Guardian characterizes the status this way:  “US midterms 2022: Democrats’ hope of keeping House fades as counting continues – live.”   The New York Times lists those elections left to call here.

Many of the states with a large share of outstanding votes conduct elections primarily or entirely by mail. It may still be days until news organizations can project which party will control the House next session, but Republicans appear to be on track to reach a majority of seats if the latest trends continue.

In California, where several competitive House races are not yet called, about 65 percent of the expected vote has been tallied statewide. Ballots there have until Tuesday to arrive. In 2020 it took the state 11 days to report 95 percent of its votes.

In Arizona, a substantial number of voters did not return their ballots until Election Day. Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, is not expected to finish counting until early this week.

In Oregon and Washington State, all or most ballots are expected by Tuesday.

Results continue to be reported.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to hold rallies before his supposed Tuesday announcement of his next Presidential bid.  He continues to attack the Jewish community in the United States for not adequately supporting Israel.  This is from Haaretz.  “At ZOA Event, Trump Again Attacks U.S. Jews for Supporting Democrats.  The former U.S. President says too many Jewish people ‘are not doing the right thing for Israel’ by voting for the party that just won the Senate in last week’s midterm election.”  Trump seems to misunderstand the diversity of Jewish Congregations in the United and that the Zionism faction is not a universally held Jewish belief.

Former President Donald Trump blasted American Jews for failing to vote for Republicans in sufficient numbers after he accepted the Theodor Herzl Medallion from the Zionist Organization of America, at the right-wing group’s annual gala on Sunday.

“You do have people in this country that happen to be Jewish that are not doing the right thing for Israel – too many,” Trump said, echoing a post he made on social media last month that drew heavy criticism from the American-Jewish community. ”The Democrats get 75 percent of the [Jewish] vote, which is hard to believe. We can’t let that continue,” he said.

Barack Hussein Obama … and then it’s 75 percent of the vote.” He then turned to ZOA President Morton Klein in mock confusion, exclaiming, “What the hell is going on here, Mort?”

Speaking at the sold-out event at New York City’s Pier 60, Trump proceeded to attack the “people in Congress who hate Israel,” contrasting the situation with the past when “you couldn’t touch Israel and couldn’t say a bad thing about it.”

Paul Klee, The Twittering Machine, 1922

Maybe he should learn a little more about the various traditions in the United States, like those practiced in the Reform Judaism congregations.

The Supreme Court continues to reject attempts at gun safety laws. This is from the AP: “Supreme Court rejects another bump stock ban case.”  We will live with the nutcases Trump appointed for a very long time.

The Supreme Court on Monday again declined to hear a lawsuit involving a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, the gun attachments that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.

The justices’ decision not to hear the case leaves in place a lower court decision that rejected bump stock owners’ efforts to be compensated for bump stocks they lawfully purchased, but were required to to give up after the administration ruled they were illegal. Lower courts had said the case should be dismissed.

As is typical, the justices made no comments in declining to hear the case, and it was among many the court rejected Monday.

Last month, the justices rejected two other challenges involving the ban. Gun rights advocates, however, scored a big win at the court earlier this year, when the justices by a 6-3 vote expanded gun-possession rights, weakening states’ ability to limit the carrying of guns in public.

In the tradition of Uncle Clarence Thomas, more of the Right Wing Justices are taking part in clear Political Events, further eroding any confidence that they may be the least bit impartial.  This is from Reuters: “Standing ovations for conservative U.S. justices at Federalist Society event.” I am appalled by their various comments at this event.

U.S. Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett received standing ovations from members of the conservative Federalist Society on Thursday at its first annual convention since the court overturned a nationwide right to abortion.

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch also received applause at the event of the legal group, which is one of the most influential in the country and whose members have long criticized the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that the court overturned in June.

Alito, Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch have helped create a new conservative supermajority on the court.

The loudest applause at the event in Washington, D.C. may have been not for the justices but for Alito’s opinion in the June ruling. Other conservative members of the court backed the ruling.

Alito did not mention the ruling or other aspects of the court’s work during his brief remarks. But Stephen Markman, a former justice on the Michigan Supreme Court, said that if the ruling were forever associated with Alito, “I do not know of any decision on any court by any judge of which that judge could be more proud.”

The comments were met by a standing ovation, with attendees turning to face toward Alito.

Barrett also briefly spoke at the event, largely honoring the late Judge Laurence Silberman, who served on D.C.’s federal appeals court and died last month. As she took the stage, Barrett said: “It’s really nice to have a lot of noise made not by protesters outside of my house.”

Paul Klee, “Death and Fire,” 1940

Gee, the Hand Maiden doesn’t want any of us peons in our democratic society disturbing her attempts to put Christian Nationalism in its place. She needs her beauty rest.

Trump continues to be blamed for all the losses and such bad candidates.  Let’s not forget that all Trump has really done is amplify what’s been cooking in the oven since the Reagan years, at the very least.   That might be a ham in the oven, but the pig wore lipstick before it got there.

From The Washington Post: “Trump blame continues for midterm losses as ex-president readies to announce bid. ‘I’m tired of losing,’ Trump critic Larry Hogan says, as Republican senators weigh in on leadership contest.”  The problem is that even though they attempt to gentrify their radical agenda, the base wants its anger and red meat.  I don’t think you will be able to put that back into the closet.

Donald Trump’s Republican critics renewed their push Sunday to steer their party away from the former president, warning that he could hurt Republicans’ chances of winning the Senate runoff in Georgia next month if he announces plans for another White House bid on Tuesday.

“It’s basically the third election in a row that Donald Trump has cost us the race,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And it’s like, three strikes, you’re out.” Hogan said it would be a mistake to nominate Trump again as the party’s 2024 presidential candidate after Republicans failed to take control of the Senate and made far fewer gains in the House than predicted in the midterm elections.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result,” he added. “Donald Trump kept saying we’re gonna be winning so much we’re gonna get tired of winning. I’m tired of losing. That’s all he’s done.”

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) echoed Hogan’s comments on ABC’s “This Week,” calling Don Bolduc, the Republican Senate nominee in his state, a “Republican extremist” and saying the results across the country amounted to “a rejection of that extremism.”

Frantisek Kupka, Localization of Graphic Motifs II, 1912/1913

They can afford to say that now that the Supreme Court is doing its dirty work. I still remember them touting the style of the now Virginia Governor who tried to act moderate enough to get elected but then went full-on Christian White Nationalist.  I think they’re just trying to fool centrists and independent voters.  Genn Youngkin may have worn the clothing, but he still was a pig wearing lipstick. However, Trump has attacked him recently since he’s not quite pro-Trumpy enough. “Trump hits out at Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin with the bizarre comment that his name ‘sounds Chinese’. This report is from The Insider.

Former President Donald Trump lashed out at Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin amid speculation that the governor might run for president in 2024.

Writing on Truth Social on Friday, Trump bizarrely commented that the governor’s name, which he spelled “Young Kin” “sounds Chinese.”

Trump also took credit for Youngkin’s political rise, claiming that he would not have become governor without his endorsement.

“I Endorsed him, did a very big Trump Rally for him telephonically, got MAGA to Vote for him – or he couldn’t have come close to winning. But he knows that, and admits it,” Trump wrote.

Youngkin dismissed Trump’s comments while speaking to reporters on Friday and said he was focused on bringing people together.

“Listen, you all know me, I do not call people names,” the governor said. “I really work hard to bring people together and that’s what we’re working on.”

“That’s not the way I roll and not the way I behave,” he added.

Youngkin has previously declined to comment on whether he would run in 2024, stating in October that he was “focused right now on being the best governor in Virginia that I can possibly be.”

Gustav Klimt, Baby (Cradle), 1917/1918

No matter how much he talks like a polite gentleman, his policies are the same old Republican Culture wars and wealthy class, corporate appeasement with the same dose of White Christian Nationalism and Jingoism. “Youngkin proposes new history standards, including teaching patriotism in Va. schools.”

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is overhauling former Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration’s proposal that would have set history and social science standards in Virginia schools.

Youngkin’s VDOE’s new draft proposal would determine what students learn about American history and Virginia history inside the classroom.

If adopted by the Virginia Board of Education, the new standards will be in effect for seven years starting in the 2024-2025 school year. Professional development would begin in the summer of 2023, according to a fact sheet that was sent to legislators and obtained by 7News.

The Governor’s 53-page proposal would require:

  • Kindergarteners to learn patriotism which includes pledging allegiance to the American flag
  • Students would learn critical thinking skills starting in the first grade
  • Starting in 4th grade, students would describe the Civil Rights movement in Virginia and students would describe why James Madison is called the “Father of the U.S. Constitution” and why George Washington is called the “Father of our Country” and students would learn about Reconstruction and the Civil War
  • In 11th grade, students would learn about Christopher Columbus and about the race-based enslavement of Africans and more

After Youngkin appointed new members to the Virginia Board of Education this year, the board delayed adopting the history curriculum proposal that was crafted under the Northam administration.

Northam’s proposed revisions to the history curriculum, which have now been scrapped, included:

  • Lessons on the LGTBQ+ community and social justice
  • Numerous lessons on racism and discrimination
  • Recognized holidays like Juneteenth
  • Lessons on gender equity and equality, climate defense, and renewable energy
  • It would have halted the requirement of teaching some lessons on Christopher Columbus and Benjamin Franklin
  • It would have scrapped the requirement of understanding why George Washington is called the “Father of our Country” and why James Madison is called the “Father of the Constitution.”

See. Pig meet Lipstick.

The one governor’s race that I’m watching is still going in a good direction. “Kari Lake’s path to victory continues to narrow despite gains.”  Lake would’ve joined the ranks of elected Republican women that continuously embarrass women and Americans everywhere.  

Anyway, that’s my offerings for today.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Friday Reads: So much Outrage so little Time

Posted: September 18, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: 2016 elections, 2020 Elections, abortion rights, Afternoon Reads, Psychopaths in charge, public corruption | Tags: | 29 Comments

Georg Tappert. Carnival, 1930

Good Day Sky Dancers!

The headlines today are so outrageous that I had trouble reading even one of them for awhile.  We have to get rid of Mitch McConnell. This greeted me from Salon and I had to go lie down in bed for awhile to pet the dog. Petting my cats and dogs is getting to be such a comfort ritual for me they all take turns jumping up to see if I’m okay.

“Mitch McConnell rams through six Trump judges in 30 hours after blocking coronavirus aid for months. Planned Parenthood warned that “many” of the judges have “hostile records” toward human rights and abortion.”  Republicans are beholden to White Male Supremacy and a very narrow view of Christianity and the rest of us are held hostage.  This was written by Igor Derysh

The Republican-led Senate confirmed six of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees to lifetime appointments over two days this week, even though it has delayed crucial coronavirus relief since May.

The Senate filled four federal vacancies in California and two in Illinois, Bloomberg Law reported. It is also expected to confirm two additional Illinois judges in short order.

“The Senate has confirmed six of Trump’s judicial nominees in the past 30 hours,” tweeted Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “These are lifetime appointments that McConnell’s pushing through instead of the HEROES Act & other crucial legislation.”

Three of the judges were appointed to seats covering Los Angeles, while another was appointed to a seat covering San Diego. There are 11 additional nominees to California courts awaiting Senate confirmation.

The Senate additionally confirmed David Dugan and Stephen McGlynn to the Eastern District of Illinois while ending the debate on the nominations of Iain Johnston to the Northern District. The upper chamber is also expected to end debate on the nomination of Franklin Ulyses Valderrama to the Northern District of Illinois.

Three of the judges were appointed to seats covering Los Angeles, while another was appointed to a seat covering San Diego. There are 11 additional nominees to California courts awaiting Senate confirmation.

The Senate additionally confirmed David Dugan and Stephen McGlynn to the Eastern District of Illinois while ending the debate on the nominations of Iain Johnston to the Northern District. The upper chamber is also expected to end debate on the nomination of Franklin Ulyses Valderrama to the Northern District of Illinois.

Advocacy groups sounded the alarm over the confirmations of Dugan and McGlynn, who received support from anti-abortion organizations and signaled their opposition to abortion rights.

“Today’s vote should never have even happened. People are calling on their senators to provide relief from the COVID-19 pandemic, economic recession and the rampant anti-Black violence occurring around the country,” Anisha Singh, the director of judiciary affairs at Planned Parenthood, said in a statement. “And yet, the Senate majority continues to prioritize confirming judges for lifetime appointments — many with hostile records on reproductive and civil rights, including abortion.”

Singh called on the Senate to “immediately halt” upcoming votes, noting that the two judges’ “records demonstrate they are more likely to be threats to people’s health, rights and bodily autonomy.”

Georg Tappert. Creole, 1911

Today’s Republican Party is a pantheon of anti-democratic values. These judges they appoint are the same kinds of goose steppers you’d expect to find in any Banana Republic. From Vox and Ian Millhiser:  “Chief Justice Roberts’s lifelong crusade against voting rights, explained. He has fought to undermine voting rights his entire career.”

John Roberts was 26 years old, and he was outraged that he’d just been outmaneuvered by older and much more experienced political hands.

It was 1981. Roberts had just completed a prestigious clerkship with Justice William Rehnquist — then the most conservative judge to serve on the Supreme Court in decades — and, as an aide to Attorney General William French Smith, Roberts was tasked with making the case against one of the most consequential voting rights laws in the nation’s history.

The House had recently passed legislation extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a seminal civil rights bill that dismantled much of Jim Crow — and shoring up one of its key provisions after a 1980 Supreme Court decision had severely weakened the law. Meanwhile, a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate had co-sponsored the same bill.

Roberts was distraught.

“Something must be done to educate the Senators on the seriousness of this problem,” Roberts wrote his boss, Smith, just a few days before Christmas. In a subsequent memo, he argued that the rapidly advancing bill — which now forms much of the backbone of American voting rights law — was “not only constitutionally suspect, but also contrary to the most fundamental tenants [sic]of the legislative process on which the laws of this country are based.”

Roberts’s early crusade against voting rights ended in failure. Though President Reagan preferred a weaker voting rights law — he once described the Voting Rights Act as “humiliating to the South” — the conservative president eventually bowed to political pressure and signed the legislation Roberts deemed contrary to many of our nation’s “most fundamental” tenets.

But time was on Roberts’s side. He rose within government and within the legal profession until President George W. Bush made him chief justice of the United States in 2005. Roberts is now the most powerful judge in the country. As Congress has grown more and more dysfunctional, the Supreme Court is increasingly the locus of policymaking within the United States.

Georg Tappert. Fest, 1925

What follows in this long read is a good explanation of what Conservative (sic) Republicans have against voting rights even though the last time it passed it had overwhelming bipartisan support and was signed into law by Dubya. But, then came Shelby.

Justice Antonin Scalia gave voice to this frustration during oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Roberts Court case that quashed preclearance. The Voting Rights Act, Scalia claimed, was a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” and “whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”

“I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act,” Scalia continued. “And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless — unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution.”

Scalia had just turned 76 when his Court heard Shelby County, and he’d watched his fellow Republicans bow over and over again to liberals. That, in Scalia’s mind, was a failure of democracy. His side had won the presidency and, in some cases, control of Congress. And yet the victor did not collect the spoils.

And so the Supreme Court’s Republican majority stepped up to cure this perceived injustice. Chief Justice Roberts led the charge.

There are more whistle blowers coming forward than ever before, including a few in the Justice Department that are testifying in front of Congress.  Here is FBI Director Christopher Wray warning of Russian Interference Redux.

Plus, there’s this: “The FBI director also broke with Trump’s claim that antifa is a terrorist organization.”  from Politico

FBI Director Christopher Wray on Thursday described “very active efforts” by Russia to interfere in the 2020 election, primarily by working to damage former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Wray said Russians have been using social media, as well as “proxies, state media, online journals” and other vehicles to hurt Biden and what it views as anti-Russian factions in U.S. politics.

Wray’s assessment affirms the findings of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which last month described Russia’s efforts to damage Biden and specifically identified Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker who has met with President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, as an agent of Russia’s influence operations.

Wray’s testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee affirmed that Russia is continuing to take an active role in the 2020 campaign with less than 50 days until Election Day. He offered no new specifics in the early-going of the hearing, but emphasized that the intelligence community has not seen evidence that Russia is reprising its 2016 attempt to target election infrastructure, such as voter databases.

In testimony to the Homeland Security Committee, Wray also diverged from Trump’s claim that “antifa” is a terrorist organization. Rather, Wray said antifa is “more of an ideology or a movement than an organization” and though there has been violence by some who self-identify as antifa, it has not appeared to be part of a central organization.

“Antifa is a real thing,” Wray said. “But it’s not an organization or a structure.”

Under questioning from Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Wray indicated that white supremacist violence is the largest portion of what he described as the most significant domestic terrorism threat in the country: “racially motivated violent extremism.”

Oh, look, two groups looking to overthrow the US’s form of government are basically the Trump Base and Trump’s Handler Putin. Which brings to me to the music accompanying my art theme today which is, again, German expressionists painting life during the rise of Hitler.

1917 Max Beckmann Autoportrait au foulard rouge

So, the most stunning thing to me this week is that our Attorney General and Head of Federal Law Enforcement has decided to not even hide his fascist and theocratic tendencies. BB had an entire list of Barr’s crazy notions in yesterday’s post. Grinding through them yesterday was one of the most depressing things I have ever done.  The man should be tossed in a padded cell.

And so, after reading all that, this headline made a lot of sense to me. It’s from WAPO: ” The United States is backsliding into autocracy under Trump, scholars warn.  The weakening of democratic values — a path that’s difficult to reverse — has accelerated, according to hundreds of indicators assessed each year.”  This is by Christopher Ingraham.

Three years into the Trump administration, American democracy has eroded to a point that more often than not leads to full-blown autocracy, according to a project that tracks the health of representative government in nations around the world.

The project, called V-Dem, or Varieties of Democracy, is an effort to precisely quantify global democracy at the country level based on hundreds indicators assessed annually by thousands of individual experts. It’s one of several ongoing projects by political scientists that have registered a weakening of democratic values in the United States in recent years.

V-Dem’s findings are bracing: The United States is undergoing “substantial autocratization” — defined as the loss of democratic traits — that has accelerated precipitously under President Trump. This is particularly alarming in light of what the group’s historic data show: Only 1 in 5 democracies that start down this path are able to reverse the damage before succumbing to full-blown autocracy.

…

Each year, the V-Dem project asks its experts to rate their respective nations on hundreds of measures of democracy, such as the presence of legislative checks on executive power, freedom of personal expression, the civility of political discourse, free and open elections, and executive branch corruption, among others.

The United States is backsliding on all of those measures. “Executive respect for the Constitution is now at the lowest level since 1865,” said Michael Coppedge, a Notre Dame political scientist and one of the project’s chief investigators. “Corruption in the executive branch is basically the worst since Harding.”

Warren G. Harding, whose administration was tainted by corruption and scandal, is routinely ranked among the nation’s worst chief executives

1914 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Couple de danseur

Keep reading the article. The list is horrifying.

I’m pretty sure Mitchie is off doing his dirty work because already seated judges are busy overturning all kinds of Trumpist things at the state level.  Today, a judge banned a Michigan law making it illegal to drive people to polls which is something churches routinely do for their elderly and homebound down here.  Yesterday, a judge ordered the Post Office to stop and reverse everything it was doing to slow down the mail. 

A federal judge on Thursday blocked controversial changes to the United States postal service, saying they were “a politically motivated attack” that had slowed the nation’s mail and likely would slow the delivery of ballots in the upcoming presidential election.

And, of course we’re back to the time where we just might possibly be purposefully sterilizing women of color in ICE Detention.  This story grows more horrifying by the day too. “AP Exclusive: More migrant women say they didn’t OK surgery”  reported by Nomaan Merchant.

Sitting across from her lawyer at an immigration detention center in rural Georgia, Mileidy Cardentey Fernandez unbuttoned her jail jumpsuit to show the scars on her abdomen. There were three small, circular marks.

The 39-year-old woman from Cuba was told only that she would undergo an operation to treat her ovarian cysts, but a month later, she’s still not sure what procedure she got. After Cardentey repeatedly requested her medical records to find out, Irwin County Detention Center gave her more than 100 pages showing a diagnosis of cysts but nothing from the day of the surgery.

“The only thing they told me was: ‘You’re going to go to sleep and when you wake up, we will have finished,’” Cardentey said this week in a phone interview.

Cardentey kept her hospital bracelet. It has the date, Aug. 14, and part of the doctor’s name, Dr. Mahendra Amin, a gynecologist linked this week to allegations of unwanted hysterectomies and other procedures done on detained immigrant women that jeopardize their ability to have children.

An Associated Press review of medical records for four women and interviews with lawyers revealed growing allegations that Amin performed surgeries and other procedures on detained immigrants that they never sought or didn’t fully understand. Although some procedures could be justified based on problems documented in the records, the women’s lack of consent or knowledge raises severe legal and ethical issues, lawyers and medical experts said.

Amin has performed surgery or other gynecological treatment on at least eight women detained at Irwin County Detention Center since 2017, including one hysterectomy, said Andrew Free, an immigration and civil rights lawyer working with other attorneys to investigate medical treatment at the jail. Doctors are helping the attorneys examine new records and more women are coming forward to report their treatment by Amin, Free said.

“The indication is there’s a systemic lack of truly informed and legally valid consent to perform procedures that could ultimately result — intentionally or unintentionally — in sterilization,” he said.

1920 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Malade dans la nuit

Is this just limited to this one doctor so it is likely fraud of some kind or is it systemic ?

Well, yesterday and today’s news is that the CDC was forced to publish Covid-19 testing guidelines against scientists complaints that were written by the Trumpist Regime and inserted on the site against every one’s advice.  And TWICE now.

The guidance said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of Covid-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus. It came at a time when public health experts were pushing for more testing rather than less, and administration officials told The Times that the document was a C.D.C. product and had been revised with input from the agency’s director, Dr. Robert Redfield.

But officials told The Times this week that the Department of Health and Human Services did the rewriting and then “dropped” it into the C.D.C.’s public website, flouting the agency’s strict scientific review process.

“That was a doc that came from the top down, from the H.H.S. and the task force,” said a federal official with knowledge of the matter, referring to the White House task force on the coronavirus. “That policy does not reflect what many people at the C.D.C. feel should be the policy.”

And we have Dan Coates and more Generals sounding an alarm..

So with that,  I feel I need to leave you with this:

So, you know the routine!  Be safe!  Be kind and gentle to yourself and others!  Stay home as much as you can!  Check in with us so we know you’re okay!!  We care about you!!!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Monday Reads: Let’s Party On!

Posted: July 25, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: 2016 elections | Tags: , , , , , , , | 75 Comments

Good Afternoon!! 13775518_10208996102160286_3629317989192247839_n

I’m looking forward to the opening Gavel of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia tonight.  Ohio Congress woman Marsha Fudge is the chair now of this DNC.  The other DNC is being chaired temporarily by Donna Brazile. Elizabeth Warren will be the Keynote Democratic Convention speaker tonight. Other speakers include Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), first lady Michelle Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

It is rumored that Bernie Sanders will turn over his delegates tonight.  We shall see and we shall have an open thread for it.  I’m excited to hear  Booker, Michelle, and Warren.  Hopefully, Michelle will joke mightily on how she has already had her words ring through the RNC.

Meanwhile, as you may have noticed, we have a new front pager.  We’ve known her for a very long time as BlueLyon.  Today, she’s our woman on the spot in Philadelphia as an important member of Team Hillary Nevada!  She’s also been working since the caucuses with one of Hillary’s organizers that came to work with me in Louisiana so we’re getting all of our six degrees of separation connected!   I’m going to be working on the Florida general as part of Team Louisiana but if I get a chance to call up to Nevada I surely will. I’ve got that image of the front of  USA Today because Carissa is right there representing for Nevada and Hillary.

If you have an Apple phone. You can call and volunteer for Team Hillary and win cool swag. The Android ap is on its way. Check out the apple ap here. Help out those hard workers like Carissa Snedeker who are fighting to win a key state if you’re in a red state like me, or a super safe blue state like Boston Booomer.

I can’t think of a better way to welcome BlueLyon to our front page than by sharing the USA Today interview with her from Philadelphia. Well, that and to remind you that she is one helluva photographer too!!

“I’m so excited about the prospect that there could be children who are born who have never seen a Reno_Snedeker_Carissa_Clinton (1)white man in the White House as president because we’ve had eight years of Barack Obama and then maybe we go to a woman and it’s just the paradigm, it’s changes the conversation in a way that I’ve seen in my own lifetime. I’m a child of the ‘60s and ‘70s and, I mean, the horrific things that are happening now, but yet we have marriage equality, and we have trans rights and we’re talking about gay people where they’re our neighbors and they don’t have to hide anymore, and women can be CEOs and there’s no help wanted ads where “help wanted male” and “help wanted female.” I’ve seen all these things change in my life so I know that we can still keep making progress. I don’t want to go backwards, I want to go forwards. I want to move forward, and that’s why I do this.”

So, obviously she’s very very busy and will check in with us when she can!  Give her a great welcome and wish her luck!!!

So here’s a treat!!! There will be painted Donkeys all over Philadelphia this week.  I’m going to feature some pix of them. Fifty Seven Donkeys will be on display throughout Philadelphia.

Ed Rendell came up with the idea. Obviously.

A collection of 57 painted donkey statues will decorate Philadelphia during the months of July and August, the former governor and current chairman of the Democratic National Convention host committee announced today at a press conference. The point of the donkeys, he says, is to get Philadelphians excited about this summer’s Democratic Convention and encourage delegates to visit different parts of the city. We’re guessing it doesn’t hurt that the donkeys will inevitably inspire tons of photo-ops and selfies, too.

“You all remember the bulls or the cows in Chicago,” Rendell said. “I thought, what a great idea to have donkeys around town. … The host committee wants this to be a great convention for the Democratic Party, but we also want it to be a great convention for the people of Philadelphia.”

Donkey7-1000x562That being said, not all the Bernie supporters are getting on the Hillary Train.  I have a feeling we’re having similar problems to the ones we had in 2008 where Hillary Blogs got completely overrun by republican ratfucking Tea Partiers!  If you were with us when this blog turned from my personal file cabinet to a functioning blog, you’ll remember it well. I do believe those folks abandoned Hillary eventually and went on to hate her as much as they hated President Obama.  We were very critical of the President here–especially in his first term–because he seemed overly willing to give in to Republicans.  That being said, Obama learned a few lessons and he’s been doing great and we support him while still being critical based on whatever issues we care about.  We’ve been investigating Tim Kaine as part of that and are beginning to warm up to him.

The silliest kerfuffle of the day has been the Wikileaks DNC stuff.  My bottom line is this  on the very idea that an entire state or group of states can be rigged by the DNC.  I’m tired of freaking conspiracy theorists from the left and right wing. I don’t think people have a clue about the idea of rigging elections. Just because a bunch of us learned to actively dislike and not vote for a candidate running as a Democrat to Grift the benefits of party apparatus and then actively showing contempt for everyone and everything is not evidence of anything illegal. Party politics with its internecine infighting is always ugly. There are too many state and local governments run by Republicans for a Democratic political entity to rig any state election. If you want to get rid of the worst of it, fight to end caucuses.

Joshua Holland has this to say and I agree completely.  What worries me most is the idea that BostonBoomer discussed on Saturday.  Trump is beholden financially to the Russian state and most likely the Russian Mafia and it’s likely the hack was done for wikileaks by Russians.

You can’t prove a negative, but when you strip away the furious spin, the DNC leaks provide strong evidence that the DNC did nothing to influence the outcome of the primaries.

The key here is just how candid and unvarnished these discussions were. It’s abundantly clear that they never imagined that these emails would ever see the light of day. They are frank in their contempt for people like Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver. They don’t hesitate to say fuck this or that person. They are open in their discussions of how to respond to various accusations that they were influencing the primaries.

And yet, in almost 20,000 very candid emails among seven high-level DNC officials over a five-month period, there is zero evidence that the organization took any action to tilt the playing field. There is a single email where one staffer floats the idea of intervening in the primaries by questioning Sanders’ religious beliefs in the South, but that idea was shot down. (I think it’s obvious that guy should resign or be fired.)

You can’t prove a negative — maybe they used a Get Smart-style Cone of Silence to discuss rigging the primaries. But one would imagine that in such a large trove of totally unguarded correspondence, some evidence of active intervention would emerge if it were indeed happening.

Again, there’s a lot of spin going on here, including by Wikileaks itself, which has been tweeting links to banal documents with inflammatory editorial comments this am.

The leaks reveal two things that are being spun as evidence that the DNC wasn’t neutral.

First, it’s clear than over the course of the campaign, an enormous amount of bad blood developed between the organization and the Sanders camp. This likely dates back to the NGP-VAN brouhaha. The objective facts were that a Sanders staffer breached the Clinton campaign’s data. The campaign apologized for it, and fired the staffer responsible, but then cried foul when its access was suspended for 24 hours while they investigated how it had happened. Their frustration then grew noticeably when the campaign accused the Nevada Democratic Party of breaking its rules at the state convention — claims that have been widely debunked. Whatever one thinks about those incidents, neutrality does not mean pretending that you aren’t pissed off about constantly being accused of corruption.

Others are seizing on the fact that the DNC leadership seemed pretty sure that HRC would be the party’s nominee. The implication is that they were only so confident because they had a thumb on the scale. The problem with that argument is that if you surveyed Washington DC-based political professionals, it’s likely that 90+ percent of them would tell you that they never though Sanders had much of a chance of securing the nomination. That includes people who *supported* Sanders. I backed him and never thought he could win, and I know many other knowledgeable Sanders supporters who felt the same way. Neutrality doesn’t require either believing that all candidates have an equal shot of winning, or pretending to believe it.

The DNC Leaks would be a big nothingburger aside from the fact that they entailed a very serious breach of donors’ private data, including financial information.

Also troubling is the fact that some individuals or groups, perhaps allied with the Russian government and perhaps not, are very purposefully trying to intervene in the election in a way that might lead to the ascension of a fascist. That’s the part that should be really troubling.

So, I really don’t want to give much space too Trump but there are two links that I really minnesota prince donkeythink you should have for reference.  First, I’d like to just say that it appears that the hackers were Russian.

Is the Kremlin trying to throw the U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump? It sounds like something out of a spy novel. But many cybersecurity experts, as well as the Hillary Clinton campaign, are now saying the Russians are responsible for last month’s hack of the Democratic National Committee.

That hack has dominated the news cycle on the eve of the Democratic convention, and for good reason. The emails disclosed Friday by WikiLeaks are embarrassing. They show DNC chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, plotting to undermine the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, confirming the worst suspicions of the left flank of the party. She resigned her post on Sunday.

But the bigger issue is who was responsible for the hack in the first place. Bob Gourley, a former chief technology officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency and now the co-founder and partner Cognitio, a cybersecurity consultancy, told me Sunday that he thinks the Russians did it.

“The software code that I have seen from the hack had all the telltale signs of being Russian, including code re-used from other attacks,” Gourley told me. “This is a really big deal. Some people in the community are saying this is the Russians pretending to be a hacker, then giving that information to Julian Assange is all part of an operation.” (Assange founded WikiLeaks.)

Gourley is not alone among cybersecurity experts. When the hack of the DNC was first disclosed in June, the security firm Crowdstrike alsopointed to the Russians. Crowdstrike investigated the incident for the Democratic party and concluded it was the same actor that penetrated the State Department, White House and Pentagon unclassified systems in 2015. Describing the code used for the penetration in a blog post, Crowdstrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch wrote: “Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services.”

Virgin-Islands

Yesterday, folks were trying to say folks were trying to reignite the cold war.  Again, Cybersecurity and Intelligence experts say it’s the Russians not just Clinton Supporters.

Here’s a link which is from Reddit and contains the very troublesome, autocratic records, affiliations, comments, and foreign dictators of Trump.  I’ve provided a few examples which are just a few of us outrageous acts of war statements.

Trump openly calls for the U.S to commit war crimes and advocates for the murder of innocent women and children.

Trump doubles down after veterans speak out claiming U.S soldiers would not commit war crimes or torture children even if ordered to. Trump responds with, “They’re not going to refuse me. If I say do it, they’re going to do it.“

Trump on torture: “Even if it doesn’t work they probably deserved it anyway.”

Trump renews calls for torture citing public executions and mass rape committed by ISIS promising for the U.S to do the same, “fighting fire with fire.”

Trump says Geneva Conventions a problem and needs to be changed since, US soldiers are to afraid to do their job due to laws which outline the definition of war crimes.

Go check out the entire thing because if you ever need to convince any one we’re dealing with a fascist, this list will open your eyes.636041630797870281-071416-WIL-DNC-ART-JC00056

This other link is from The National: “Trump’s vision is one of exclusion and enmity.”  I have no doubt that this week in Philadelphia will be all about the opposite thing as we see the faces of all American and not just the angry few.

Historically it’s rare that the public isn’t warned about a would-be demagogue well in advance of their actual rise to power. Typically, this work is done by the narcissistic aspiring strongmen themselves. And in the case of Donald Trump, by now no American can claim they haven’t been put on ample notice about his character and intentions.

Last week’s Republican convention – a festival of rage, loss, anger and hatred – said it all. It was driven by vicious, personalised hatred against the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, as delegates persistently chanted “Lock her up!”

One of Mr Trump’s campaign advisers suggested she should be shot for treason. Ben Carson accused her, literally and with a straight face, of being in league with Satan.

Hysterical outrage was compounded by the relentless cognitive dissonance of a movement that, no matter how brazen, is moving so far beyond the bounds of propriety that it has cultivated some deniability. Virtually every important message was shadowed by some twisted doppelganger lurking visibly in the background and contradicting it.

Mr Trump’s main appeal is his alleged competence. He claims the country is being run by crooks, losers and idiots, three of his favourite epithets, and suggests that not only can he do better, but that “I alone” can solve the apocalyptic “crisis” facing the country.

But the convention itself, and the Trump campaign more broadly, strongly suggest he can’t run a bath. From plagiarism to high-level defections, tedious programming, stunning no-shows and a reliance on the candidate’s own children, rather than national party leaders, to endorse him, one couldn’t have wished for a more thorough refutation of claims of minimal competency, let alone excellence.

After more than a year of unprecedented, systematic dishonesty, Mr Trump posed as a champion of truth. “There will be no lies here,” he promised. It’s easy to tell when he’s lying: his body language, penchant for repetition, and, above all, his insufferable catchphrase: “believe me” are his sure-fire “tells” (unconscious admissions of deception). Whenever he says “believe me”, he knows he’s brazenly lying.

New-Jersey-Donkey2-940x540-937x540So, I’m going to end with something cheery besides those marvelous Donkey Statues.  Hillary has promised us a very different convention from the HATERPALOOZA we saw last week.

Hillary Clinton pledged that Democrats would offer the country “a very different kind of convention” than Republicans as she campaigned Monday in this battleground state a few hours before the start of her party’s gathering in Philadelphia.

“I’m very excited about contrasting our vision and values with what we saw from Donald Trump and the Republicans,” Clinton told supporters packed into a theater here. “He offered a lot of fear, bigotry and smear.”

Here is the link to the live stream from Youtube of the convention.  As I type, I’m hearing Spanish!!!

See you during the speeches tonight!!  We’ll be here!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?