1. #28606
    Invincible Jersey Ninja Tami's Avatar
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    NJ's Largest City Launches $6,000 Guaranteed Income Pilot Program

    A two-year pilot program is underway in New Jersey's largest city to provide hundreds of low-income residents with guaranteed income through cash payments.

    The program kicked off in Newark on Monday for the first 30 residents of the program, with plans to expand to several hundred people by the fall.

    "Today I'm proud to announce that Newark has taken a historic step towards economic justice by launching The Newark Movement for Economic Equity, Newark's guaranteed pilot program aimed at giving recurring cash payments to Newark residents," Baraka said Monday outside City Hall.
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  2. #28607
    Extraordinary Member CaptainEurope's Avatar
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    Deadly school shooting /bombing in Russia:

    The Russian news agency Interfax reported that at least 9 people — eight pupils and a teacher — had died in the incident.

    While one of the attackers, a teenager, was reportedly detained, Interfax cited a source saying a second gunman could still be in the building.

  3. #28608

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    We've had some discussions about this sort of thing in this thread, and it's very personal for some of us. But the media is covering the need for it:

    In The Wake Of Jan. 6, Families Are Searching For Ways To Deradicalize Their Relatives
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  4. #28609
    Old school comic book fan WestPhillyPunisher's Avatar
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    CNN Advertisers Silent On Rick Santorum’s Racist Comments About Native Americans

    Does anybody care about sharing airtime with a guy who said “nothing” existed in America before white colonizers arrived? Shame on those advertisers for supporting CNN who should've fired Santorum for his heinous comments.

    **********

    Arizona GOP State Senator Now Regrets Recount: ‘It Makes Us Look Like Idiots’

    “I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point,” Paul Boyer said of partisan recount. All together now---NO ****, SHERLOCK!!

    **********

    Kevin McCarthy Says ‘Big Tent Party’ Is Ready To Purge Liz Cheney

    It’s official: The House Republican Conference will vote Wednesday on whether to recall its chair, Rep. Liz Cheney. Yeah, Big WHITE RACIST SEDITIONIST Tent Party.

    **********

    Reversing Trump, U.S. Restores Transgender Health Protections

    The Department of Health and Human Services affirmed that federal laws forbidding sex discrimination in health care also protect gay and transgender people. Decency once again prevails.

    **********

    Former RNC Chair Agrees GOP Is One Of The World’s Largest Anti-Democracy Forces

    “How do you make democracy something that the right cares about again?” MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace asked Michael Steele. This presupposes that the Qpublican Party even cares about democracy, and I don't think they do.
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  5. #28610

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    On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of the current U.S. House Representative for Kansas’ 3rd District, Kevin Yoder, who we noted was a part of the Republican delegation that visited Israel in August of 2012 that got blitzed out of their minds on liquor, and in the ultimate combination of being high on Judeo-Christian faith and wasted on Jaegermeister from that huge bar tab on taxpayers dime… went skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee. While on official business for our government. He was re-elected in spite of this admission, because he only faced a Libertarian candidate in 2012, and has gone on to vote against the Farm Bill (despite serving a district in a state with a lot of farms), and to hide from reporters for weeks after he snuck an amendment onto a budget bill can to chip away at Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform, feeling that Wall Street banks should be allowed the “freedom” to do everything stupid that caused the 2007 Great Recession all over again. (His biggest campaign contributors, of course, are Wall Street banks.) Yoder, voted by Washington media as “one of the biggest party animals in Congress”, also has the hypocrisy of voting against disaster relief for Hurricane Sandy victims, but asking for tornado relief whenever one hits his district, voted to defund Planned Parenthood in 2011, but maintain government funding towards NASCAR sponsorships, and did not just vote for the 2013 Government Shutdown, but voted against e-opening the government when the time came. He is also not above hyperventilating about the GOP outrage of the moment, including his call for a travel ban to Africa during the 2014 Ebola Virus outbreak in spite of the advice of all medical experts, and voting for bills like the “No More Solyndras Act”, the “Stop the War on Coal Act”, and the “Stop the Targeting of Political Beliefs by the IRS Act”. He has underhandedly worked to subvert Dodd-Frank legislation, even voted against the bipartisan-supported Farm Bill (which Kansas tends to like, what with the farms that are famously in Kansas) and didn't just vote against the Planned Parenthood videos, he sent an open letter to House Speaker John Boehner where he described the selectively edited, fraudulent “sting” videos created by the Center for Medical Progress and feigned outrage over their supposed practices that "harvest and sell baby organs", and graphically describing "innocent children, ripped from their mother's womb and their skulls crushed". Even though, y'know, that wasn't based in reality. With a Blue Wave election looming in 2018, Kevin Yoder started skipping town halls and practically hiding from his own constituents, who took notice that he was only taking meetings with big banks and payday loan executives or say, Ivanka Trump. Kansas' 3rd Congressional District had a +4 Republican lean, but that wasn’t enough to save Yoder from having a boot placed firmly in his arse in 2018, as he ended up losing to new Congresswoman Sharice Davids by almost ten full percentage points, even with that advantage. Now that he has free time, that he might, as a private citizen, make himself happy by returning to the Holy Land to go skinny-dipping again.
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  6. #28611

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    Thom Tillis

    On this date one year ago, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled the U.S. Senator from North Carolina, Thom Tillis, who first got his Senate seat back in the 2014 elections. Prior to heading to Washington, D.C., Tillis served in the North Carolina House of Representatives from 2007-2014. Now, we don’t want to just focus on Tillis’ career in our nation’s capital in this profile, and point out that North Carolina’s state government not-coincidentally went full-on Looney Tunes right around the point where the Tea Party began influencing the GOP and putting partisan tools like Tillis into seats of power. Tillis was allowed to run for re-election unopposed in 2008, 2010, and 2012. And from his role as House Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, the entire state legislature got gerrymandered into a false majority, and North Carolina Republicans started passing laws like stricter Voter ID bills (while Tillis admitted there was not statistical evidence of fraud to justify the need for it) and votes to cut the number of early voting days (aimed at suppressing the vote and maintaining that false majority further that were all turned away by appeals courts), an amendment to the state Constitution to ban same sex marriage (and he hasn’t changed his position on same sex marriage even after the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling), the notorious “Motorcycle Safety Abortion Bill” (where upon a bill requiring helmets for motorcyclists was amended to become one of the harshest anti-choice measures in all the country).

    Perhaps his most shocking moment as a state legislator was in 2011, when he gave his thoughts on using a “divide and conquer” strategy to combat people who receive government assistance:

    Tillis never apologized for those remarks, instead claiming he “misspoke” a bit, and then going on to pledge his support for welfare drug testing (which repeatedly has proven not just a failed policy, but courts rule it an unconstitutional one).

    After stacking the deck for himself with the laws he pushed for passage as a legislator to suppress the vote in his favor in the years prior, Thom Tillis did made his run for Senate in 2014, employing a data firm you may have heard of that year called Cambridge Analytica, who may have already used the data from a Facebook primary breach to help him win office with a meager 48.2% over Democratic Senator Kay Hagan, the smallest winning total for a Senator from North Carolina in an election, ever. We’ll note Tillis spent the months leading up to the election fear-mongering about the spread of the Ebola virus into the United States, saying that not enough was being done by the Obama administration to stop travel from Africa.

    Tillis, since winning office in 2014, somehow he has dug in and become even more conservative, not just maintaining his Personhood stance on abortion, He drafted legislation that would overturn the Affordable Care Act with the promise of still protecting pre-existing conditions, but had to pull it out of embarrassment that it was so poorly written it would just strip protections from almost everyone with them. He cravenly caved in support of Donald Trump’s immigration policies like the spineless toad he is, for fear he would lose a primary election this year. He denies the existence of climate change, calling it “not a fact” and was the first U.S. Senator to write to Donald Trump asking him to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords. On guns, Tillis is extreme enough to have an “A+” rating from the NRA, probably because he was willing to even vote against a bill that would have prevented anyone on a terror watch list from purchasing a firearm.

    Thom Tillis is so against regulating businesses that, and we’re not joking about this, in 2015 wondered why people were going to make restaurant workers wash their hands after using the bathroom. Yes, this is exactly the kind of guy you want making decisions for Americans as a legislator right now.

    So it will come as little surprise that a guy who rode to office by fearmongering about a deadly disease like Ebolavirus and will scrutinize even science is simple as “food service workers should wash their hands”, while Tillis was up for re-election in 2020, he was mostly mum about the god-awful response the Trump administration has had to the spread of COVID-19. Instead, at a town hall in September of 2020, Senator Tillis threw any credibility he might have had out of the window by trying to make excuses for that abysmal response by becoming a “death total truther” and talking about conspiracy theories being spread by Qanon supporters that the “real mortality rate from Covid-19” was far lower because deaths from "things like heart attacks, and slip-and-falls and things like that" were being attributed to Covid-19. (Experts have said if anything, the numbers are too LOW.) Tillis went on to advocate for “herd immunity”, and throw cold water on the advisement of medical experts to continue social distancing until the populace was vaccinated.

    And yet, AND YET… this absolute s***stain was re-elected in 2020, again failing to cross the 50% threshold, getting just 48.7% this time out against Cal Cunningham in a highly contested race. Since returning to the Senate, Sen. Tillis has voted against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, refusing to hold him accountable for a violent coup attempt on the Capitol that resulted in five deaths and very nearly could have caused the deaths of elected officials, voted against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 because he would rather do nothing to help Americans during a pandemic, against raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and has voted against the majority of President Biden’s Cabinet nominations. Barring any scandals forcing his resignation, Thom Tillis will now be in office until 2026.

    We are now pausing from writing blog posts to drink profusely, given that fact.
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  7. #28612
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    The New York Times had a piece going into detail about Ma’Khia Bryant’s struggles in Foster Care, before she was gunned down by police while trying to stab another young woman with a steak knife.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/u...mid=tw-nytimes

    It covers how her mom, a nursing assistant, lost custody.

    In 2018, Paula Bryant had moved with her five children — including a teenage son from a previous relationship — into a house in West Columbus, where, she said in an interview, the landlords did not mind her credit problems. Mr. Hammonds, Ma’Khia’s father, did not live with the family and Ms. Bryant described herself as raising the children largely on her own.

    The Hilltop neighborhood once housed blue-collar workers for a General Motors plant, but the plant was shuttered years ago, and many of the bungalows have been converted into cheap rentals. It has one of the highest crime rates in the city.

    Andrea Douglass, 37, a pastor’s wife who lived two doors down from the Bryant family that year, has gotten used to turbulence. When shootings occur on her block, she said, “it’s a big hubbub for a day or two and then life just moves on.” But, three years later, she can still remember the fights between Ms. Bryant and her daughters.

    “The girls ran out of the house terrified, and were hanging out in the backyard screaming while the mom was yelling at them,” Ms. Douglass said, recalling that she was worried about their safety. “I never want kids to be afraid. When kids are afraid, that is a problem.”

    The family had been on the radar of Children Services for several years, amid repeated complaints that the two youngest children were absent from school. In February 2017, Ms. Bryant took Ma’Khia, Ja’Niah and two younger siblings to one of the agency’s offices and said “she was at her wits end” and could no longer handle them, according to a Children Services document outlining the case. The children, Ms. Bryant told the agency, had “no respect” for those around them.

    The move to Hilltop had been difficult for her daughters, who missed their friends on the East Side, Ms. Bryant said. “They were kind of rebelling in the home,” she said. The police came, she said, when she was arguing with Ma’Khia and Ja’Niah over bedtimes, and their younger sister, Azariah, ran outside and yelled for help.

    “The officers said, you have just lost control as a parent, meaning, you can tell them to go to bed, go upstairs right now, and they’re not going to go,” she said. The children told police officers that they had suffered physical abuse from their mother and an older half brother, according to the mother’s lawyer, Michelle Martin, though Ms. Bryant denied ever abusing them. A magistrate judge dismissed the abuse claims against Ms. Bryant in February 2019 but found that she had neglected the children, according to court documents.
    It also looks at why she and her siblings were separated from her grandmother.

    Ms. Hammonds, their grandmother, took the four children into her two-bedroom apartment, sleeping on the couch so the children could have the beds. After about six months, she began receiving $1,200 a month in aid from the state to cover their care.

    Service agencies offer far less support to family members who agree to take care of children in need: The per diem allowances paid to licensed foster parents are often 10 times greater than the public assistance paid to relatives. A grandparent can become licensed as a foster parent, but it can take as long as six months, said Anthony Capizzi, an Ohio family court judge who took part in a comprehensive review of the state’s family services in 2019.

    Ms. Hammonds did not have that long to wait.

    “I was worn out,” she recalled. “I was doing all the laundry, all the cooking, and I was working a part-time job at the time. And it was difficult because these children came from a lot of dysfunction.”

    Then her landlord found out that the children had moved into the apartment and told her she would have to move. She scrambled, placing the older girls at a summer camp and the younger two siblings in temporary foster care. When the camp ended, she had few options.

    In desperation, she called the children’s caseworker to ask if she could take them to a hotel with her for a few nights, but the caseworker said that was not allowed. He told her to drop the two older girls off at Franklin County Children Services, a hulking brick edifice in downtown Columbus.

    She found it frustrating; she felt the children belonged with their family.

    “They could’ve just given me what they give one foster parent, and then I could’ve gotten housing, taken care of the kids and done what I needed to do,” Ms. Hammonds said.

    When they pulled up to the building, she said, Ma’Khia did not want to get out of the car.

    “She didn’t want to leave me,” she said. “I think about that all the time.”
    This is a sad story that does not fall neatly into the left-right divide, and continues to raise difficult questions (Should there be a greater tolerance of neglect for parents of older children, given the trauma separation causes? Should there be restrictions on the ability of landlords to kick out tenants who take in multiple teenage relatives? How do we decrease the number of traumatic family situations which result in kids being taken into foster care?)
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  8. #28613
    Invincible Jersey Ninja Tami's Avatar
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    Meet the far-right Pennsylvania Republican who believes that God was behind Trump’s attempted coup

    If the Keystone State has an equivalent of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, former Washington Rep. Matt Shea or U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, it is arguably Pennsylvania State Rep. Doug Mastriano — a far-right Republican, evangelical Christian fundamentalist, conspiracy theorist and devotee of former President Donald Trump who relentlessly promoted Trump's false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Mastriano's extremism and its connection to Christian nationalism is the focus of an article written by The New Yorker's Eliza Griswold and published on May 9.
    "In the past year," Griswold explains, "he has led rallies against mask mandates and other public-health protocols, which he has characterized as 'the governor's autocratic control over our lives.' He has become a leader of the Stop the Steal campaign, and claims that he spoke to Donald Trump at least 15 times between the 2020 election and the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. He urged his followers to attend the rally at the Capitol that led to the riots, saying, 'I'm really praying that God will pour His Spirit upon Washington, D.C. like we've never seen before.' Throughout this time, he has cast the fight against both lockdowns and Trump's electoral loss as a religious battle against the forces of evil."

    Mastriano, according to Griswold, "has come to embody a set of beliefs characterized as Christian nationalism, which center on the idea that God intended America to be a Christian nation.
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  9. #28614
    Old school comic book fan WestPhillyPunisher's Avatar
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    Well, it was pretty much a given my state would have a total nutbag like this clown. Meanwhile, oh, WBEEEEEEEE...!
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  10. #28615
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    Caitlyn Jenner Draws Low Support In First Major UC Berkeley Poll Since Announcing Gubernatorial Bid

    Despite national media attention and name recognition, Caitlyn Jenner drew low support in the most recent UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, their first since she got into California’s gubernatorial race.

    The poll showed that Jenner got just 6% support, behind Republicans Kevin Faulconer and John Cox, who each received 22%, according to the Los Angeles Times, a sponsor of the survey.

    The poll was conducted online to 10,289 registered voters, with a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points. Participants were polled from April 29 to May 5. The latter date is when Jenner gave her first major TV interview, on Fox News’ Hannity. She sat down with CNN for another interview on Monday.
    "I love mankind...it's people I can't stand!!"

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  11. #28616
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kirby101 View Post
    The Family name helped him.
    Oh for sure. Hard to knock him with the Bushes/Clintons/Cuomos. More blame on the people buying the same "brand" because they've heard of it.

  12. #28617
    Old school comic book fan WestPhillyPunisher's Avatar
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    6 percent, eh? I'm surprised the harridan got THAT much support. If those numbers remain static, or go lower in subsequent polls, Jenner's campaign will be pretty much cooked.
    Avatar: Here's to the late, great Steve Dillon. Best. Punisher. Artist. EVER!

  13. #28618
    Ultimate Member Malvolio's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by WestPhillyPunisher View Post
    CNN Advertisers Silent On Rick Santorum’s Racist Comments About Native Americans

    Does anybody care about sharing airtime with a guy who said “nothing” existed in America before white colonizers arrived? Shame on those advertisers for supporting CNN who should've fired Santorum for his heinous comments.

    **********

    Arizona GOP State Senator Now Regrets Recount: ‘It Makes Us Look Like Idiots’

    “I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point,” Paul Boyer said of partisan recount. All together now---NO ****, SHERLOCK!!

    **********

    Kevin McCarthy Says ‘Big Tent Party’ Is Ready To Purge Liz Cheney

    It’s official: The House Republican Conference will vote Wednesday on whether to recall its chair, Rep. Liz Cheney. Yeah, Big WHITE RACIST SEDITIONIST Tent Party.

    **********

    Reversing Trump, U.S. Restores Transgender Health Protections

    The Department of Health and Human Services affirmed that federal laws forbidding sex discrimination in health care also protect gay and transgender people. Decency once again prevails.

    **********

    Former RNC Chair Agrees GOP Is One Of The World’s Largest Anti-Democracy Forces

    “How do you make democracy something that the right cares about again?” MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace asked Michael Steele. This presupposes that the Qpublican Party even cares about democracy, and I don't think they do.
    I'm currently reading a biography of Mikhail Gorbachev and there's a term that the author brings up several times to describe the cognitive dissonance found so often in the political history of the Soviet Union. That term is doublethink. I think that term would apply to Kevin McCarthy right here, as well as to many other Republicans.
    Watching television is not an activity.

  14. #28619
    Astonishing Member JackDaw's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Malvolio View Post
    I'm currently reading a biography of Mikhail Gorbachev and there's a term that the author brings up several times to describe the cognitive dissonance found so often in the political history of the Soviet Union. That term is doublethink. I think that term would apply to Kevin McCarthy right here, as well as to many other Republicans.
    The term (doublethink) was invented by George Orwell (in the novel 1984).

  15. #28620
    Scarlet Witch~4~LIFE!!^_^ CJStriker's Avatar
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    "By Earth and Sky, By Craft and Hex -- By The Past and The Future – I Call HOPE Forth From The DARKNESS! I Speak The Words We Made Into MAGIC! Let THEIR Power Augment Our OWN! To Strike ONE BLOW From Our HEARTS and SOULS – From ALL THAT WE ARE! Let The CALL Go Forth -- AVENGERS! ASSEMBLE!" Scarlet Witch/Wanda Maximoff ~~ From Avengers #689!

    Come Join and Learn about Wanda Maximoff at: The Scarlet Witch Appreciation Thread 2023!

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