All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[CSTowle]

I find it ironic that the far right love to use Nazi Germany as an argument for freedom when most of the anti semitism comes from the far right.

There is an argument that the left criticizes Israel's apartheid government and land theft which is labeled as antisemitism, though I think you can criticize a country (including your own) without hating them or being bigoted towards them. Plenty of Israelis and American Jewish folk are just as critical.

There's also the attempt to label the Nazis as leftist because of the "Socialist" part of National Socialist, though they never make a similar argument about the People's Democratic Republic of Korea.

It's nonsense, but that hardly matters.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

So the Oklahoma GOP is just likening any vaccine mandate to the treatment the Jews received from Germans during the Holocaust, yellow star of David and all.



This would be the same state that currently is running out of pediatric ICU beds to treat children with Covid-19.

But they don't care if those kids die. Republicans do not apply "Pro-Life" to children who have evacuated a womb.

Aren't there Jewish advocacy groups out there raising holy hell over this vile ****?

[worstblogever]

Aren't there Jewish advocacy groups out there raising holy hell over this vile ****?

Oh yeah. You better believe it.

[Tami]

Louisiana veto session carried $76K price tag for taxpayers

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana’s two-day veto session, which saw Republicans unable to override any of Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’ bill rejections, cost taxpayers $76,000.

Information provided in response to a request from The Associated Press showed most of the House and Senate expenses involved the $160 daily per diem given to state lawmakers and their mileage expenses.

The veto session held July 20 and 21 was the state’s first ever under the 1974 state constitution.

House Clerk Michelle Fontenot said the House’s costs came in at $47,000, while data provided by Senate Secretary Yolanda Dixon showed the Senate’s costs came in just over $29,000.

The $38,000-per-day session was pushed by GOP lawmakers seeking to enact some of the bills jettisoned by Edwards. But the effort failed to reverse a single veto because Republicans couldn’t reach the two-thirds vote required.

Republican senators agreed to overturn a gubernatorial veto of a bill banning transgender girls from playing on school sports teams with their identified gender, but the override fell two votes short in the House. Other override efforts didn’t get enough Senate support, and the House didn’t take votes on bills beyond the transgender sports ban.

[Tami]

SolarWinds hackers nailed federal prosecutors' offices, Department of Justice says

Hackers hit the offices of top US federal prosecutors nationwide last December, breaking in to email accounts, the Department of Justice said Friday. As part of the SolarWinds hack, attackers accessed accounts at nearly 30 US Attorneys' offices, including offices in Washington, DC; New York and California, the DOJ said.

The department had revealed in January that its Microsoft O365 email environment had been breached, but it hadn't provided the information about the US Attorneys.

"The Department of Justice understands that when victims make information public about the nature and scope of computer intrusions they suffered, others can use that information to prepare themselves for the next threat," the DOJ said in a statement Friday. "To encourage transparency and strengthen homeland resilience, today we are providing additional details about the SolarWinds intrusion in December 2020."

The DOJ said at least one employee's account had been accessed at 27 offices from the West Coast to the East. It said at least 80% of employees at the US Attorneys' offices in the Eastern, Northern, Southern, and Western Districts of New York had seen their accounts breached, with other districts "impacted to a lesser degree."

[Tami]

Not the usual, but still news based.

I've been keeping a record of the times I use my rescue inhaler for my Asthma. Most weeks I normally only use it, maybe once or twice. Since July 19th, I have had to use it pretty much every day, sometimes twice a day, though I can tell it's getting slowly better.

Bottom line, the July 19 was when the smoke from the forest fires on the west coast and the surrounding areas have been making it's way to the East Coast.

Seems like I am living proof that smoke from massive forest fires can affect people on the other side of the continent.

There may not be much that can be done this year, but hopefully there will be more that can be done in the following years to prevent or lessen these fires.

[Spike-X]

Rep. Madison Cawthorn tried to board plane with gun; could face fine, status loss

But it's ok because he has white privilege, so he won't be charged with a crime.

It was not clear why the eight people, including Cawthorn, had not been charged.

Oh, I think it's pretty clear.

[numberthirty]

You are absolutely right.

Still, considering how many of them are dying from COVID, one way to possibly look at it is if the Antitvaxxers got together and built their very own Concentration Camp. Then they built they very own gas chambers. Then they willing entered the gas chambers while shouting how it was their freedom of choice to do so.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.....without Life, there is no Pursuit of Happiness.

That one starts to falter pretty quickly though.

If one's happiness is directly tied to just how free they feel that they are, than their freedom will be the central component of pursuing their happiness.

[numberthirty]

If that's the case?

You are going to get caught in a mosh pretty quickly.

"You can have all of the pursuit of happiness that you want. Just hope that that happiness wasn't going to involve being particularly free..."

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Not the usual, but still news based.

I've been keeping a record of the times I use my rescue inhaler for my Asthma. Most weeks I normally only use it, maybe once or twice. Since July 19th, I have had to use it pretty much every day, sometimes twice a day, though I can tell it's getting slowly better.

Bottom line, the July 19 was when the smoke from the forest fires on the west coast and the surrounding areas have been making it's way to the East Coast.

Seems like I am living proof that smoke from massive forest fires can affect people on the other side of the continent.

There may not be much that can be done this year, but hopefully there will be more that can be done in the following years to prevent or lessen these fires.

Sorry to hear you've been having health troubles because of the smoke from those west coast fires. The skies here had been hazy for days last week because of said smoke.

[worstblogever]

On this date, in both 2014, as well as in 2015, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled former one-term Michigan Congressman Kerry Bentivolio, who only found his way into office because his predecessor was caught forging signatures in his own re-election bid right at the deadline to register for the Republican primary, so he got a conservative-leaning district gift-wrapped to head to serve in the U.S. House. Bentivolio was a special kind of kooky, as his career prior to running for office was that of a reindeer farmer who ran a Christmas village in his district. To this day, you can find photos of a shirtless Kerry Bentivolio blowing air-kisses at his reindeer pals. Bentivolio also once starred in a 9-11 Truther movie where President Bush was left in a bed to sit in his own filth by a nurse for his role in the "inside job". While in Congress, he gleefully ran amok with Tea Party loons during the 2013 Government Shutdown in protests near the White House, talked about how impeaching President Obama would be a "dream come true", and generally proved himself clueless while in Washington, including mispronouncing "Samoa" when introducing the Representative from there and utterly butchering his name. Bentivolio’s utter mistake of a Congressional career seems good and over.

It was in 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented profiles of the U.S. House Representative from Tennessee's 6th Congressional District, Diane Black, who was another beneficiary of the 2010 Tea Party Wave to help her find her way to Washington, D.C. Back 2012, Black faced no Democratic challenger, getting a slam-dunk victory that saw her main threat coming in the GOP Primary, where she had to fend off Lou Ann Zelenik, an anti-Muslim fearmonger who claimed Rep. Black hadn't done enough to prevent the rise of Islam in Tennessee, with the evidence being the mosque that stands in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Rather than call out Zelenik for her bigotry, Black instead began trying to one-up her, saying that "violent Islam" was becoming the norm, and "not the exception". Don't worry, though, she didn't abandon this disgusting belief after surviving the primary challenge that year. Diane Black has actually introduced one of those blatantly paranoid anti-Sharia bills you normally see idiots trying to pass at the state level back in Tennessee in 2010, and now that she's in Congress, she tried to get it banned at the federal level. Perhaps Diane Black's worst comment on Muslims, however, is when she said, "Until the American Muslim community find it in their hearts to separate themselves from their evil, radical counterparts, to condemn those who want to destroy our civilization and will fight against them, we are not obligated to open our society to any of them." Great. We’ll just expect an entire religion to condemn those who represent it most poorly before we can allow them to be in the country. Maybe we should ask Rep. Black to properly condemn the KKK before she can be a citizen, too, just so everything’s equal across the board. In March of 2016, Black was sitting on the "Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives", and was asking important, totally non-biased questions like, “In our society, have we reached a point where there is an Amazon.com for baby parts, including entire babies? That's a pretty easy answer: "No, Goddamn it." "Baby Body Parts" was the sort of rhetoric that inspired Roland James Dear to shoot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, through the apparatus of stochastic terror. So great job there, Rep. Black. Maybe after you’re done criticizing the Klan so we can trust that you’re not a Christian terrorist is also condemn people who attack abortion clinics and the people who work at them, eh? By June 9th, 2016, Black was hanging out with the Family Research Council (the always delightful anti-gay hate group), and she tried justifying the witch hunts being launched against Planned Parenthood after the "sting" videos (the fraudulent ones) produced by the Center for Medical Progress were released. Diane Black did not need much justification to get the torches and pitchforks, because the organization was worthy of suspicion "just because they provide abortions": Meanwhile, when actual children were slaughtered, en masse, by Adam Lanza, and there was a call for universal background checks and preventing the mentally ill from getting military-grade weapons, Diane Black was not thinking about dead children quite the same way. Because she knew guns weren't the real problem... she blamed it on “Unprecedented levels of violent games, music and so on.” After a more recent mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, in May of 2018, Diane Black revisited the topic of mass shootings yet again, saying that “pornography is the root cause” of the problem. Black’s legislative record is full of attempts at repealing the Affordable Care Act, defunding Planned Parenthood, and she even voted for the 2013 Government Shutdown, only to vote against re-opening the government when the time came, sixteen days later. But alas, in 2018, Diane Black chose to leave her seat in Congress, taking her Islamophobic, anti-abortion, and gun crazy philosophy back home to run to be the next Governor of Tennessee to replace the term-limited Bill Haslam. Black finished third in the GOP Primary, only getting 23% of the vote after spending millions of dollars of her own money trying to win. She has not run for office since, and may not ever again (and we’re fine with that).

[worstblogever]

On this date one year ago, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled the U.S. House Representative from Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, Mark Green, who was first elected in 2018 in a race he won by 34 points to replace Marsha Blackburn, who chose to run for Senate that year, and that should tell you exactly how conservative the district is. Prior to that, Green served six years in the Tennessee State Senate, and in 2017 was briefly nominated to be the Secretary of the Army but withdrew after several bigoted comments attributed to him against Muslims and transgender Americans were revealed by journalists. He referred to a transphobic bill as how he aims to “[I[crush evil[/I]”, claimed psychiatrists refer to transgender as a “disease” (maybe a half century ago), and stated he would try to prevent anything about Islam to be taught in schools because “Muslims think Jesus wasn’t born from a virgin” (which is false, they consider Jesus as one of their prophets).

What has quickly become clear to us is that Mark Green is a former physician and has abandoned the Hippocratic oath in favor of conservative ideology. When, about a month before he was sworn into Congress, he went on a rant about how vaccines cause autism, we were concerned. But we’re currently watch this dips*** get into arguments with sane members of Congress about the increased protection provided by wearing a face covering or mask during the Covid-19 pandemic.

He in fact, claims such a simple precaution is “irrational”, angrily citing in a hearing that he saw a jogger wearing a face mask on his way to the capitol in June of 2020:

“As I came in today, I saw a gentleman running on the sidewalk. There was no one within a hundred yards of the guy, yet he was wearing a mask while running. This speaks to the irrational fears this dishonest representation of the data by the media has caused.”

This of course is f***ing stupid, because at some point during their run, that jogger would certainly pass by another human being.

It should come as little surprise, then, that he pretty consistently rejects science, believing in Personhood, rejecting that climate change is man-made, and that he denies the science behind evolution.

Yes. Mark Green is that bad. So you probably wouldn’t be surprised that his voting record looks like this the past 18 months:

• March 7th, 2019: Green votes against HR 183, a resolution to condemn anti-Semitism as a hateful extension of intolerance.
• October 23rd, 2019: Green is one of 41 Republicans who, while staring down the possibility of Donald Trump being impeached, stage a ridiculous publicity stunt in response by crashing a classified impeachment inquiry hearing for a “protest”.
• December 18th, 2019: Green ignores his Congressional duty to hold a president who has been proven to commit high crimes and misdemeanors accountable and votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
• May 15th, 2020: Green votes against the HEROES Act, to further support the healthcare industry and citizens affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
• December 10th, 2020: Green signs his name to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, begging them to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The same election that he won re-election in.
• January 6th, 2021: Mark Green votes for the objection to the electoral college’s votes in the 2020 election, a failure to send any sort of message that he wasn’t intimidated or sympathetic to those who attacked the Capitol to attempt a violent coup.
• January 13th, 2021: Rep. Green votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because the Republican Party no longer feels like they should be accountable for anything, including failed coups that result in the deaths of both their participants and police officers.
• February 4th, 2021: Mark Green votes to keep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments, because he wouldn’t want her to be accountable for all the bigoted remarks and conspiracy theories she’s spread online (probably because she’s a kindred spirit).
• February 25th, 2021: Green votes against HR 5, the latest version of the Equality Act, that would provide workplace protections for LGBTQ Americans.
• March 3rd, 2021: Rep. Green votes against HR 1, a bill created to prevent the corruption of money in politics, and protect voter access to the ballot box.
• March 3rd, 2021: Mark Green votes against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021.
• March 10th, 2021: Green votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he feels people deserve to die in poverty during a pandemic.
• March 17th, 2021: Rep. Green votes against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, likely because they feel the 2nd Amendment remaining absolute is more important than preventing people with a history of domestic abuse from owning a firearm (which statistics show, makes them more likely to use those firearms against women in their lives).
• May 19th, 2021: Mark Green votes against HR 3233, the creation of a commission to investigate the Capitol Attack.
• May 20th, 2021: Green is one of 63 Republicans who vote against the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act.

Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, as we stated, is highly conservative, with a +20 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index. Mark Green could face a primary challenge based on his correct assessment of the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6th, though, when he went on record to call them “Un-American” for their violent attempt at an insurrection. However, that only makes his stubborn refusal to investigate the attack or to hold anyone at all accountable maddening.

He’s far too busy, after all, incessantly whining on social media about Critical Race Theory, or spreading baseless conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19.

Y’know… priorities.

[Hellion]

Not the usual, but still news based.

I've been keeping a record of the times I use my rescue inhaler for my Asthma. Most weeks I normally only use it, maybe once or twice. Since July 19th, I have had to use it pretty much every day, sometimes twice a day, though I can tell it's getting slowly better.

Bottom line, the July 19 was when the smoke from the forest fires on the west coast and the surrounding areas have been making it's way to the East Coast.

Seems like I am living proof that smoke from massive forest fires can affect people on the other side of the continent.

There may not be much that can be done this year, but hopefully there will be more that can be done in the following years to prevent or lessen these fires.

Sorry to hear the smoke is messing with people on the East Coast. My friends in New York are bothered as well. I live right in the middle of all the wildfire activity and this summer has been unusual for the fact that the smoke isn't affecting me at all, when usually this time of year I'm a pathetic, writhing mess of inflamed sinuses and weeping eyes. I wonder if this isn't because allergens were particularly potent and horrible this spring, and after my body struggled through that for a few months, all this smoke isn't an issue for it right now?

Between all this and the pandemic, our planet seems to be fighting back against the human race, and rightly so.

[Tami]

Sorry to hear the smoke is messing with people on the East Coast. My friends in New York are bothered as well. I live right in the middle of all the wildfire activity and this summer has been unusual for the fact that the smoke isn't affecting me at all, when usually this time of year I'm a pathetic, writhing mess of inflamed sinuses and weeping eyes. I wonder if this isn't because allergens were particularly potent and horrible this spring, and after my body struggled through that for a few months, all this smoke isn't an issue for it right now?

Between all this and the pandemic, our planet seems to be fighting back against the human race, and rightly so.

I hope you stay safe, same for everyone living near those areas.

From a scientific/Ecological perspective, occasional forest fires can be good for a forest. It helps to clear away the accumulated materials on the ground and helps certain tree seeds begin growing.

“When fire is eliminated, plant and animal species [can] suffer, and their populations often decline,” Hagan said. “In the absence of fire, forests become much denser, and fuels like leaves, branches and dead trees accumulate.”

Yet too many forest fires, especially unnatural ones, are harmful to the forest, the animals, as well as to people.

Study Shows 84% of Wildfires Caused by Humans

[Tami]

Already Distorting Jan. 6, G.O.P. Now Concocts Entire Counternarrative

Just go on Fox News and admit your guilt and get it over with.

This past week, amid the emotional testimony of police officers at the first hearing of a House select committee, Republicans completed their journey through the looking-glass, spinning a new counternarrative of that deadly day. No longer content to absolve Mr. Trump, they concocted a version of events in which those accused of rioting were patriotic political prisoners and Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to blame for the violence.

Their new claims, some voiced from the highest levels of House Republican leadership, amount to a disinformation campaign being promulgated from the steps of the Capitol, aimed at giving cover to their party and intensifying the threats to political accountability.

This rendering of events — together with new evidence that Mr. Trump had counted on allies in Congress to help him use a baseless allegation of corruption to overturn the election — pointed to what some democracy experts see as a dangerous new sign in American politics: Even with Mr. Trump gone from the White House, many Republicans have little intention of abandoning the prevarication that was a hallmark of his presidency.