1. #30901
    Ultimate Member babyblob's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Robotman View Post
    8 months?!? A slap on the wrist for trying to destroy our democracy.

    Capitol rioter gets 8 months in prison in first Jan. 6 felony sentence
    I love the hard quotes form the judge.

    He said it was "chilling" that the pro-Trump mob was able to disrupt the certification of President Biden's election victory, and that Hodgkins' waving of a Trump flag on the Senate floor symbolized his loyalty to a single individual over the nation.
    "It left a stain that will remain on us and on this country for years to come," Moss added.

    I guess he forgot what he said and gave a light sentence.
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  2. #30902
    Old school comic book fan WestPhillyPunisher's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Robotman View Post
    8 months?!? A slap on the wrist for trying to destroy our democracy.

    Capitol rioter gets 8 months in prison in first Jan. 6 felony sentence
    Can't say I'm surprised. White privilege, combined with no previous arrest record and faux remorse over having stormed the Capitol. Damned frustrating, but predictable.
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  3. #30903
    Silver Sentinel BeastieRunner's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Robotman View Post
    8 months?!? A slap on the wrist for trying to destroy our democracy.

    Capitol rioter gets 8 months in prison in first Jan. 6 felony sentence
    Quote Originally Posted by WestPhillyPunisher View Post
    Can't say I'm surprised. White privilege, combined with no previous arrest record and faux remorse over having stormed the Capitol. Damned frustrating, but predictable.
    The Federal minimum until 2020 was 1 year time plus 8 month with probation for felony rioting. So 16-20 months give or take good behavior.

    Want to guess who changed that and when? It all oddly aligns with why it took so long to start charging them.

    Guys like the above will get low sentences. Defendants who plead guilty to some of the most serious crimes, like assaulting police or carrying a weapon into the Capitol, are facing an average baseline sentence between three to four years behind bars; that could go up depending on the level of violence or down if the person cooperates, among other factors.

    Those are the ones to be watching.

    Defendants hit with a nonviolent felony, such as obstructing Congress, are looking at an average baseline of around a year and a half. And federal law caps sentences for misdemeanors such as disorderly conduct and protesting in the Capitol between six months and a year, which means first-time offenders who cut a deal could argue for no prison time at all. See the above case.

    Again, I would watch the violent offenders terms, then get pissy if they are given light sentences.

    Nearly half are charged only with misdemeanors, but those accused of assaulting police could face years in prison.
    Last edited by BeastieRunner; 07-19-2021 at 01:27 PM.
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  4. #30904
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by babyblob View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by AnakinFlair View Post
    What I don't get is, no matter how big the school book market is in Texas, it can't be larger than the combined market in the other 49 states. Or even California alone. The books should show the true history of the country, warts and all. And if Texas doesn't like it, they can have their own books written.
    I Find this odd Also. i would figure with as large as California school systems are they would have a larger market and therefore more say?
    Part of the issue is that California wasn't that picky when it came to textbooks. They would accept material that meets the standards of Texas censors.

    There's an interesting description of this in an obituary for an education activist.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/e.../01gabler.html

    From its origins at the Gablers’ kitchen table in Hawkins, Tex., in 1961 to its incorporation as Educational Research Analysts in 1973, the mom-and-pop textbook-criticism enterprise grew to occupy a prominent niche in the nation’s conservative pantheon. For more than four decades, the couple influenced what children read, not just in Texas but around the country.

    The reason was Texas’ power to be a national template; the state board chooses textbooks for the entire state, and of the 20 or so states that choose books statewide, only California is bigger than Texas. It is difficult and costly for publishers to put out multiple editions, so a book rejected by Texas might not be printed at all.

    In a 1982 article in The New York Times, Anthony T. Podesta, executive director of People for the American Way, a liberal group, said, “Texas has the buying power to influence the development of teaching materials nationwide, and a textbook edition chosen for Texas often becomes the sole edition available.”

    The Gablers were first to seize on the Texas textbook process as a means of pushing their conservative principles, and their success baffled and angered civil liberties advocates and progressive educators. Publishers, with much to lose if Texas rejected their books, were often willing to make changes to please the Gablers.

    Richard Morgan, president of Macmillan’s school division, said in a 1983 interview with The Times, “Not making the list in Texas is not a good sign.”

    Mrs. Gabler, always with a smile and careful, precise diction, usually testified at textbook hearings rather than her shyer husband, Mel. She argued for more instruction in morality, free-enterprise economics, phonetics and weaknesses in evolutionary theory.

    The Gablers had a two-barreled strategy: in addition to pressing issues of ideology, interpretation and philosophy, the Gablers ferreted out errors of fact. In 2001, Time magazine reported that their “scroll of shame” of textbook mistakes since 1961 was 54 feet long. In the early 1990s, Texas fined publishers about $1 million for failing to remove hundreds of factual errors the Gablers had found in 11 history books.
    One complicating factor in the discussion is that a lot of it covers education decisions made before many of us were born.

    Texas being on the wrong side in the 1970s doesn't necessarily mean everything is the same now.
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  5. #30905
    Invincible Jersey Ninja Tami's Avatar
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    ‘It’s chilling what is happening’: a rightwing backlash to Biden takes root in Republican states

    s co-executive director of the Texas Organizing Project that seeks to empower Black and Latino neighborhoods, she is concerned too for the transgender men, women and children who are bearing the brunt of Republican intolerance in a state in which more anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been promoted by Republicans this session than in any other. “This is an assault on people who are on the margins,” she said.

    And there’s more. Much more. There’s the order by the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, to all state agencies to block Biden’s efforts to combat climate change; the new law that punishes any Texas city that has the audacity to cut police budgets; the $1,000 fines that will be imposed on anyone requiring Covid masks to be worn in public schools; the gun law that allows Texans to carry handguns with no training and without a permit.
    Brianna Brown is not feeling Biden’s vision of Americans doing things together. She is feeling the wrath of a Texan Republican party that since Donald Trump’s defeat in the presidential election last November has taken its animus to a whole other level.

    “When I leave the house with my two-year-old daughter, I now carry with me two phones: a work phone, and a personal phone,” she told the Guardian. “I make sure I always carry both because I never know when I might need to call for help. The Republicans have incited their base. There are a lot of white people out there who feel very emboldened. Walking around as a Black person, the feeling is that this can easily escalate.”

    Nor is Brianna Brown alone.

    Across a vast swath of the American heartlands, the anti-Biden backlash is being replicated in Republican-controlled statehouses in what Ronald Brownstein has described in the Atlantic as a “collective cry of defiance”.

    In some instances, the challenge to Biden is explicit. At least nine Republican-controlled states, Texas included, have passed laws banning the enforcement of federal firearms statutes in a blatant attempt to frustrate the president’s ambition to tackle the nationwide scourge of gun violence.
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  6. #30906
    Invincible Member Kirby101's Avatar
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    From what I understand, Texas is one of the few States to by textbooks State wide, rather than by the individual districts that most States have.
    So any regressive, racist decision on textbooks that Texas makes has a bigger impact nation wide than any other place. The book publishers lose too much if they don't go along with Texas, as compared to a district here or there.
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  7. #30907
    Ol' Doogie, Circa 2005 GindyPosts's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kirby101 View Post
    From what I understand, Texas is one of the few States to by textbooks State wide, rather than by the individual districts that most States have.
    So any regressive, racist decision on textbooks that Texas makes has a bigger impact nation wide than any other place. The book publishers lose too much if they don't go along with Texas, as compared to a district here or there.
    Doesn't help that most of the time, Texans who discuss the textbooks their children read want the "America, **** yeah!" version of history where we were awesome and aside from a few "accidents", nothing bad ever really happened. So, it's the dumb wanting to keep their kids dumb out of fears of some "liberal conspiracy", even though liberalism typically leans towards the moderate side of politics and likes the free market in and of itself.

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    Ol' Doogie, Circa 2005 GindyPosts's Avatar
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    Indiana University's vaccination mandate stands, but won't require vaccination proof

    It's one of those "We would like you to get vaccinated, we really would... but we aren't actually going to enforce it" rulings that has actually stood in the face of "personal freedom" policies, especially in a right-wing state like Indiana. But, naturally, the anti-vaxx nutjob community is livid.

  9. #30909
    Loony Scott Taylor's Avatar
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    Can you sue someone for lying about being vaccinated in the face of such a mandate? I wonder.
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  10. #30910
    Ultimate Member babyblob's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scott Taylor View Post
    Can you sue someone for lying about being vaccinated in the face of such a mandate? I wonder.
    Not sure about suing them but the university did say they would punish staff and students who do lie about it. How they would know I have no clue.
    Last edited by babyblob; 07-19-2021 at 03:48 PM.
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  11. #30911
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kirby101 View Post
    From what I understand, Texas is one of the few States to by textbooks State wide, rather than by the individual districts that most States have.
    So any regressive, racist decision on textbooks that Texas makes has a bigger impact nation wide than any other place. The book publishers lose too much if they don't go along with Texas, as compared to a district here or there.
    As of several decades ago, twenty states bought textbooks statewide, including California.

    But this may be a case where things have changed, or at least should have changed. It is significantly cheaper to make custom versions of books compared to 1982. This may be an area where schools are behind the curve, and not innovating as much as they could.
    Sincerely,
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  12. #30912
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    Quote Originally Posted by JDogindy View Post
    Doesn't help that most of the time, Texans who discuss the textbooks their children read want the "America, **** yeah!" version of history where we were awesome and aside from a few "accidents", nothing bad ever really happened. So, it's the dumb wanting to keep their kids dumb out of fears of some "liberal conspiracy", even though liberalism typically leans towards the moderate side of politics and likes the free market in and of itself.
    The problem with the liberal viewpoint is that the middle of the road take on American history doesn't really hold up either. So we are supposed to believe that America was founded as a genocidal, imperialistic regime by a bunch of greedy slaveowners who came up with a set of nice-sounding but fundamentally fraudulent principles to justify their socioeconomic dominance, but yet at some unspecified point in time we ceased to be that and started living up to those principles for real?

    The thing is, the extremely contrived conditions under which America was founded and the unique position it occupies within the world means that it's nearly impossible to even talk about the USA without making some kind of value judgment. A country like Uganda or Malaysia might just be able to exist as a state which is neither fundamentally good nor evil but just is a group of people trying to survive in a complicated world, without need for some coherent national narrative, but America simply cannot.

  13. #30913
    Invincible Member Kirby101's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
    As of several decades ago, twenty states bought textbooks statewide, including California.

    But this may be a case where things have changed, or at least should have changed. It is significantly cheaper to make custom versions of books compared to 1982. This may be an area where schools are behind the curve, and not innovating as much as they could.
    Thanks for the update. My info is obviously dated.
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  14. #30914
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kirby101 View Post
    Thanks for the update. My info is obviously dated.
    I want to be clear that I have no idea what the current status is. It could be that more states buy textbooks statewide, or it could be less.

    A 2020 comparison of Texas and California textbooks provides some info on context.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...textbooks.html

    There is a complication here that well informed people are remembering controversies from several years ago, but aren't necessarily aware about recent developments.
    Sincerely,
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  15. #30915
    Invincible Jersey Ninja Tami's Avatar
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    New: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy intends to name Jim Banks as the top Republican on Jan. 6 select committee, per source — as well as Jim Jordan, Rodney Davis, Kelly Armstrong, and freshman Troy Nehls.

    This was linked to it, from 2019: Banks hires son of Fox News host Carlson

    U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, R-3rd, has hired the son of Fox News political commentator Tucker Carlson.

    Buckley Carlson recently joined Banks' Capitol Hill staff in Washington after graduating from the University of Virginia. The younger Carlson had applied for a communications job with Banks, according to David Keller, his chief of staff.

    Keller said that Banks has never met Tucker Carlson, host of the Fox News Channel show “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and did not know that Buckley Carlson was his son when Buckley interviewed. Buckley did not disclose the relationship at the time.

    “Jim's got a reputation as a rising, young conservative leader on the Hill. We get folks who want to come work for him,” Keller said.

    Buckley Carlson accepted an entry-level job as a special assistant in Banks' office. He is answering phones, responding to correspondence from the congressman's northeast Indiana constituents and assisting with media communications, Keller said.
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