All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[WestPhillyPunisher]

More Than 2,000 Worldwide Now Infected With Coronavirus; 56 Dead In China

China has put Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, on virtual lockdown.

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Trump Team Launches Impeachment Defense: Actually, Dems Want To Interfere In Election

The president did nothing wrong, his defenders said over and over. Uh-huh. Right. Gotcha. Of course he didn't.

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Watch The Full Video Of Trump Ordering For Marie Yovanovitch’s Ouster

The video, published in full by PBS NewsHour, was filmed at a private dinner. And said video included one Lev Parnas, a man Trump, acting like a mob boss ordering a hit on a rival claimed not to know. Liar, liar! Pants on fire!

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Pompeo Doubles Down On NPR Reporter Attack. No One Buys It.

Twitter critics call BS after the Secretary of State indicates Mary Louise Kelly misidentified Bangladesh as Ukraine in his map challenge. Trump's henchmen, long used to being thrown softball questions on Faux News don't know what to do when they face REAL reporters who ask tough questions. They either fold like a cheap penknife or turn thuggish like Pompous Pompeo.

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75 Years After Auschwitz Liberation, Holocaust Survivors Alarmed By Rise Of Anti-Semitism

Three Holocaust survivors share their concerns about the uptick in anti-Semitism in the U.S. — and reveal what gives them hope.

[Tami]

Ivanka Trump Whines in Davos: ‘I Gave Up My Life to Move to Washington DC to Help Americans’

Forgive this, but are you f**** kidding me?

Ivanka, who has never sacrificed a thing in her life, earning an estimated $80 million last year, based upon half her genome and proximity to power, wants you to know she gave up her life for you, the American people. The New York Times reports:

[Tami]

Navy to name new aircraft carrier for African American WWII hero

Washington (CNN)The US Navy will name a new aircraft carrier after Doris "Dorie" Miller, a decorated African American World War II veteran who defended Pearl Harbor during the 1941 attack on the Hawaii naval base, making it the first aircraft carrier to be named after an African American.

Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly made the announcement Monday during a ceremony at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the national holiday commemorating the life of the slain civil rights leader.

During the attack on Pearl Harbor, Miller manned an anti-aircraft machine gun aboard the battleship USS West Virginia "until he ran out of ammunition and was ordered to abandon ship," according to a Navy biography, which said he "had not been trained to operate" the weapon. Miller said he believed he shot down a Japanese plane during the attack, the biography said. The following year, Miller received the Navy Cross, the highest medal awarded by the Navy, becoming the first African American to receive the honor.

[numberthirty]

Since this one didn't really get a lot of coverage...

https://abc3340.com/news/local/fathe...dementia-fight

Father of Alabama Sen. Doug Jones dies after dementia fight

[Tami]

China’s Omnivorous Markets Are in the Eye of a Lethal Outbreak Once Again

LANGFANG, China — The typical market in China has fruits and vegetables, butchered beef, pork and lamb, whole plucked chickens — with heads and beaks attached — and live crabs and fish, spewing water out of churning tanks. Some sell more unusual fare, including live snakes, turtles and cicadas, guinea pigs, bamboo rats, badgers, hedgehogs, otters, palm civets, even wolf cubs.

The markets are fixtures in scores of Chinese cities, and now, for at least the second time in two decades, they are the source of an epidemic that has spread fear, taxed the Communist Party bureaucracy and exposed the epidemiological risks that can spawn in places where humans and wildlife converge.

The novel coronavirus that has already killed at least 56 and sickened more than 1,370 in China and around the world is believed to have spread from exactly one of these places: a wholesale market in Wuhan, a city in central China, where vendors legally sold live animals from stalls in close quarters with hundreds of others.

[SquirrelMan]

MoveOn urges Bernie Sanders to apologize and stop elevating the endorsement of Joe Rogan

sure, but nobody cares about this story....

MoveOn, which endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016, isn’t mincing words about Joe Rogan and the Sanders campaign elevating his endorsement.

Calling Rogan and rightly so, “someone known for promoting transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism and misogyny.” They are asking for an apology and for Sanders to stop elevating Rogan’s endorsement.

[zinderel]

MoveOn urges Bernie Sanders to apologize and stop elevating the endorsement of Joe Rogan

sure, but nobody cares about this story....

Oh, I'm sure we'll learn soon enough how MoveOn arent TRUE Scotsmen, I mean progressives, at all. Plus, they probably always actually hated Bernie, so their opinion is irrelevant...

[Tami]

Hello, Earthlings, We Are Here to Destroy You

Greetings, citizens of Earth.

My slimy colleagues and I come from the planet ZOR-T4, and we do not come in peace. We’re here to decimate your civilization and plunder your planet’s resources. Our Council of Elders conducted an exhaustive study of Earth, and, unfortunately, you do not meet our standards for acceptable planetary existence. And so we must destroy you.

The Council was displeased with humankind’s rampant wars, vast socioeconomic inequality, and habit of saying “Pretty good!” when another human asks you how you’re doing, even if you’re not doing pretty good. What’s up with that? Why even ask the question if you’re all just going to lie to one another? It makes no sense.

Something we’ve done on other planets to facilitate extinction is install an impulsive imbecile as the leader of a country with advanced military technology. On planets like yours, which are already predisposed to tribalistic self-destruction, putting a raging cretin near a large cache of weapons is often the best way to insure destruction. Imagine our surprise when we saw your current state of political leadership. It was then that we knew we’d have to take a less conventional approach if we wanted to destroy Earth.

Another method of planetary annihilation that has worked for us in the past is accelerating a planet’s climate crisis. We had a whole plan laid out, where we’d get to use our big laser (finally!) to melt your glaciers and polar ice caps, causing rising sea levels and devastating weather events. But it turns out you’ve already melted most of those things on your own. In fact, you’ve done more damage than we could ever do ourselves. So, yet again, our prized big laser sits idle.

[shooshoomanjoe]

I've never heard of Joe Rogan until this recent news. The guy sounds like slime. How can anyone call themselves a progressive and be ok with this? All these Bernie Bros defending Rogan make him come off like the Alex Jones for Bernie supporters.

[Tami]

I've never heard of Joe Rogan until this recent news. The guy sounds like slime. How can anyone call themselves a progressive and be ok with this? All these Bernie Bros defending Rogan make him come off like the Alex Jones for Bernie supporters.

It any Democrat thinks about trying to appeal to Trump's Core Base, I suggest they reconsider. That's a dangerous, slippery slope to go down.

[PwrdOn]

It any Democrat thinks about trying to appeal to Trump's Core Base, I suggest they reconsider. That's a dangerous, slippery slope to go down.

Well moderates are always saying we should reject ideological purity and try to appeal more to those undecided swing state voters. Those people are by and large closet racists who only ever voted Democrat so they could benefit from social programs, and were turned when Trump's rousing of their bigotry superseded economic self interest. In a word, exactly the kind of people who listen to Joe Rogan's podcast. Hate on Bernie all you want, this was EXACTLY the strategy that centrists were angling for in the general, except that there's no chance of it working with anybody else, because do you really see the MMA bros turning out for Amy Klobuchar?

Leave aside all the ideological posturing for a second. The Democratic party simply does not care about the minority or LGBT vote, because the Republicans actively push them away so their only choices are to vote blue or stay home, both of which are startlingly ineffectual when it comes to getting the party brass to care about their demands. They just do the bare minimum to appear woke so that affluent whites, whom the party does care about, can feel comfortable voting for them. And personally, I am just sick and tired of white people doing this whole song and dance of pretending to be sensitive to race, we KNOW you don't actually care about us, try actually doing something helpful for once instead of just fixating on optics.

[PaulBullion]

Well moderates are always saying we should reject ideological purity and try to appeal more to those undecided swing state voters. Those people are by and large closet racists who only ever voted Democrat so they could benefit from social programs, and were turned when Trump's rousing of their bigotry superseded economic self interest. In a word, exactly the kind of people who listen to Joe Rogan's podcast. Hate on Bernie all you want, this was EXACTLY the strategy that centrists were angling for in the general, except that there's no chance of it working with anybody else, because do you really see the MMA bros turning out for Amy Klobuchar?

Sorry, but a lot, likely a majority, of those "centrists" you are lying about are nonwhite, nonstraight, noncis and this NOT what they are calling for. I am pretty sure you cannot link to a lot of "centrist" tweets calling to appeal to Trump's base. It's one of them main reasons why moderates dislike Sanders: his belief in a persuadable white working class as an important democratic voting block.

[ChrisIII]

I've never heard of Joe Rogan until this recent news. The guy sounds like slime. How can anyone call themselves a progressive and be ok with this? All these Bernie Bros defending Rogan make him come off like the Alex Jones for Bernie supporters.

He mainly first got noticed for starring in the Phil Hartman/David Foley sitcom "Newsradio" (Which is still very good, although it got cancelled shortly after Hartman's death), then kind of got involved with the stunt/gross-out show Fear Factor and UFC before launching his radio show/podcast.

[PwrdOn]

Sorry, but a lot, likely a majority, of those "centrists" you are lying about are nonwhite, nonstraight, noncis and this NOT what they are calling for. I am pretty sure you cannot link to a lot of "centrist" tweets calling to appeal to Trump's base. It's one of them main reasons why moderates dislike Sanders: his belief in a persuadable white working class as an important democratic voting block.

Ah but that's exactly the rub, right? Moderate liberals want to appeal to swing voters because they know they need them to win the election, but they don't like the ones that are racist, sexist, homophobic, religiously intolerant, anti-immigration, indifferent to environmental issues, or otherwise in disagreement with what they consider to be core values. And where on Earth, pray tell, can you find these people?

If the goal was to ignore the white working class and try to spur turnout in the Democratic base, one would think the operative strategy would be to run more to the left...

[Tendrin]

I've never heard of Joe Rogan until this recent news. The guy sounds like slime. How can anyone call themselves a progressive and be ok with this? All these Bernie Bros defending Rogan make him come off like the Alex Jones for Bernie supporters.

A lot of them think they're bringing people into the fold without compromising their core values, that its a 'get' and bringing in new voters. Here's Olivia Hill, a profoundly left wing person I follow on twitter, as an example of this thinking. Olivia is, I should note, a transwoman.

I feel like this Joe Rogan controversy is because Democrats have compromised their values constantly to order to court the right, and they've fallen flat on their faces every time.

Bernie shows you can reach across the aisle without compromising principles. And they HATE it.

magine throwing marginalized people under the bus for 30 years and having absolutely nothing to show for it. Then this Jewish guy fights for what's right without compromise and he's getting all sorts of people nodding along.

It must suck to see your whole ideology fall apart.

The people who told us we NEED Joe Manchin and Lieberman and McCaskill. They blocked progress. They killed people. They're seeing that no, we don't need that ****. We can unapologetically promote social and economic justice and it'll resonate with people all over the spectrum.

Let me be perfectly clear: If my choice is between someone who thinks I shouldn't be able to compete in sports with cis women but who will fight for my human rights, or a liberal "ally" who will fight AGAINST my human rights, I'm gonna side with the former.

We don't need to bail out banks and offer mealy-mouthed half solutions to fight against brutality at the border, for Native people to keep their water. We can just stand up. And people they'd never expect support from admire that consistency and principle.

Meanwhile, these people moralizing about "throwing trans people under the bus" are still defending their candidate who said "trans issues pose legitimate concern for women." Erasing us, calling us not real women in her pursuit of transphobia.

Let me be perfectly clear: If my choice is between someone who thinks I shouldn't be able to compete in sports with cis women but who will fight for my human rights, or a liberal "ally" who will fight AGAINST my human rights, I'm gonna side with the former.

That's a reference to Hillary's (very bad) comments on transwomen a while back.

Obviously, I don't agree with Olivia and think she's got this one wrong, but I find her perspective instructive as to how she can justify boosting a guy like Joe Rogan -- because she thinks he'll fight for her human rights because he'll side with Bernie. She's hardly alone here, but I don't think she grasps how quickly the space she thinks is safe will become unsafe in practice. She doesn't see the compromise she's already making. In fact, she sees Bernie AS the compromise position in the first place.

https://twitter.com/machineiv/ for her TL. She's good people, no matter where I part with her on her politics.