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

[Gray Lensman]

A pleasant surprise that it was a 9-0 decision. The NCAA has been so hypocritical for years touting their student athletes that supposedly benefit from scholarships even though they never have to attend class. They want them to play football or basketball for free while everyone else profits from it, but they can't even accept a pair of shoes in compensation? It's long past time to throw out the canard of "amateur athletics" and pay them as the de facto professionals that they are.

In addition, those rules ONLY apply to athletic scholarships. If you are on a music scholarship, you can release an album while in school, keep all the money, and not endanger your standing. Even at an NCAA school.

[Tami]

‘Italygate’ election conspiracy theory was pushed by two firms led by woman who also falsely claimed $30 million mansion was hers

Late last December, as President Donald Trump pressed senior officials to find proof of election fraud, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen a letter detailing an outlandish theory of how an Italian defense contractor had conspired with U.S. intelligence to rig the 2020 presidential contest.

The letter, which was among records released by Congress this past week, was printed under the letterhead of USAerospace Partners, a little-known Virginia aviation company. In early January, a second Virginia firm, the Institute for Good Governance, and a partner organization released a statement from an Italian attorney who claimed that a hacker had admitted involvement in the supposed conspiracy.

According to the conspiracy theory known as “Italygate,” people working for the Italian defense contractor, in coordination with senior CIA officials, used military satellites to switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden and swing the result of the election.

Though her name was not mentioned in either document, both Virginia organizations are led by Michele Roosevelt Edwards, according to state corporate filings reviewed by The Washington Post. Edwards is a former Republican congressional candidate who built a reputation as an advocate for the Somali people and as someone who could negotiate with warlords and pirates in the war-torn region.

Edwards was formerly known as Michele Ballarin but changed her name last year, court records show. In 2013, The Post’s magazine explored how Edwards, once a struggling single mom, had reinvented herself as a business executive and then as a well-connected horse-country socialite who cultivated ties with senior Somali officials.

The Institute for Good Governance’s registered headquarters since late last year has been the historical North Wales Farm, a 22-bedroom mansion in Warrenton, Va., state records show. The property is listed for sale at just under $30 million.

On the day after the 2020 election, Edwards sat for an interview at North Wales with a television crew from Iceland, where she has business interests. Edwards told the crew that the estate was her property, according to their footage. “This is my bedroom,” she said, showing the crew around. “This is very private space.”

She was pressed on the lack of personal items in the house.

“So this is where you live?” she was asked.

“Yes.”

“This is your property?”

“Yes.”

When the interviewer noted that website listings showed the property for sale, Edwards said it was a “recent acquisition for us.” She said it was not for sale.

But North Wales was then — and is now — owned by a company formed by David B. Ford, a retired financier who died in September. Ford’s widow said in an interview that she did not know Edwards. The Post showed her the footage of Edwards inside the property.

“She’s in my house,” the widow said. “How is she in my house?”

The North Wales mansion was for sale at the time, and Edwards was a licensed Realtor in the area, according to the firm’s website. Hers was not the firm Ford’s widow had hired to sell the property.

[Tami]

Unmasking the far right: An extremist paid a price when his identity was exposed online after a violent clash in Washington

In a flash, Laura Jedeed was surrounded by screaming men. The freelance journalist was filming a group of Trump supporters walking the streets of the District after the “Million MAGA March” on Nov. 14 when a man wearing an American flag gaiter mask approached her, stepped on her toes and began yelling.

“What’s up, you stupid b----?” the man shouted, his mask slipping down his face.

Jedeed yelled at the man to stop touching her. A crowd formed around her and another journalist, with unmasked men screaming at them from all directions. Jedeed kept her camera rolling, and when she got away from the crowd, she uploaded video of the incident to YouTube and Twitter, and it went viral.

Reaction was swift.

The man in the flag mask was quickly identified as Washington state resident Edward Jeremy Dawson by a local antifa group. Twitter users mining public records later released his address and phone number.

The video was amplified by Christian Exoo, a prominent anti-fascist activist who tweeted it out to his 50,000-plus followers. Exoo also included contact information for Dawson’s employer.

Two days later, Dawson lost his job as an ironworker, his employer citing his actions in D.C. His wife, Michelle, uploaded a tearful self-shot video to Twitter announcing his firing, and later that month she was asked to hand in her vest and badge at a Walmart in Battle Ground, Wash., where she worked as an online-order fulfiller. She thinks she was fired over her politics but acknowledges that she had missed a substantial amount of work because of back problems.

Anonymous abusive callers deluged the Dawsons’ cellphones, with some urging the couple to kill themselves, the Dawsons said.

The disclosure online of Dawson’s personal information — a phenomenon known as doxing — is part of a growing effort by left-wing activists to punish members of far-right groups accused of violent behavior by exposing them to their employers, family and friends. The doxing of Dawson highlights the effect the tactic can have — unemployment and personal upheaval followed by a new job that pays much less than his old one — but also the limits of the technique: Dawson is unrepentant for his role in galvanizing a mob to harass Jedeed and continues to espouse far-right views.

[Tami]

Candidates make a last dash for votes, and battle over alliances.

By Monday, the candidates had settled on their closing arguments, which unexpectedly involved evidence-free claims by one of the leading candidates, Eric Adams, that a late-in-the-race alliance between two of his rivals amounted to an effort to suppress the Black and Latino vote.

This is New York City’s first ranked-choice mayor’s race, in which voters can rank up to five candidates in order of preference. Alliances are common in ranked-choice elections, and Mr. Yang, the former presidential candidate, has formed a loose one with Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner.

They are campaigning together, and he is urging his supporters to rank her second on their ballots. Ms. Garcia is not returning the favor — she says she is merely getting out the vote.

After months of suggesting that Ms. Garcia would merely make a good second-in-command, Mr. Yang’s new gambit cast him in a more generous light — and to his campaign’s delight, the response it elicited from Mr. Adams has united Mr. Adams’s opponents in consternation.

On Monday, the day after the Adams campaign released a series of quotes from allies alleging that Ms. Garcia’s and Mr. Yang’s decision to campaign together on Juneteenth was an effort to weaken the Black and Latino vote, Mr. Adams told CNN that those were merely his allies’ words. In the next breath, he talked about tactics once used in Southern states to make it harder for Black people to vote.

“I can say this, that African-Americans are very clear on voter suppression,” said Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president. “We know about a poll tax.”

Mr. Yang and Ms. Garcia condemned Mr. Adams’s comments. Mr. Yang’s advisers hope that Mr. Adams’ comments will stoke doubt among some moderates who were considering ranking him.

Maya Wiley, another Black candidate and the leading candidate on the left, condemned Mr. Adams’s comments without naming him.

By the end of the week, I think, we should know who will be the next Mayor of NYC. Looking forward to finding out.

[InformationGeek]

Seriously, reeeeeeeally? Add it to the list, WBE

Texas Gov. Greg Abbot vetoed a bill designed to expand animal cruelty laws, specifically to restraining dogs.

Abbott called Senate Bill 474, known as the Safe Outdoor Dogs Act, “micro-managing” and said, “Texas is no place for this kind of over-criminalization.”

The bipartisan act would have made it a Class C misdemeanor if someone knowingly leaves a dog outside unattended while restrained unless the owner can provide:
Adequate shelter
An area that allows the dog to stay away from standing water, urine or feces or otherwise cause harm to the dog
Shade from direct sunlight
Potable water

The act goes on to say owners couldn’t use a chain to restrain the dog, or a tether that has weights attached or is shorter than 10 feet or five times the length of the dog measured from nose to tail. It also stipulates that the dog’s collar or harness “fit properly.”

Abbott said Texas’ statutes “already protect them by outlawing true animal cruelty.”

“Texans love their dogs,” he said. “Senate Bill 474 would compel every dog owner, on pain of criminal penalties, to monitor things like the tailoring of the dog’s collar, the time the dog spends in the bed of a truck, and the ratio of tether-to-dog ratio.”

The bill passed the Senate 28-3 and the House 83-32.

[Mister Mets]

Candidates make a last dash for votes, and battle over alliances.





By the end of the week, I think, we should know who will be the next Mayor of NYC. Looking forward to finding out.

It may take a while due to the effects of ranked choice voting.

This also changes campaign strategies, as it makes sense for candidates to work together.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/o...ey-garcia.html

Frontrunner Eric Adams suggests there's some racism behind that. Elected officials advocating on his behalf suggest that any coordination is akin to voter suppression.

Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, is also buoyed by hedge fund billionaires — as The New York Times reported, increasingly more so than Yang, since some donors have stepped up their support as he’s surged into the lead. But, I figured, Adams understands how the city works, and will owe his power to Black voters who are demanding protection from both crime and over-policing.

That said, an Adams mayoralty would likely be pretty terrible. He has a penchant for dishonesty and demagogy, and both were on full display when he accused Yang and Kathryn Garcia of racism because they had the temerity to join forces against him.

“For them to come together like they are doing in the last three days, they’re saying we can’t trust a person of color to be the mayor of the City of New York,” he said over the weekend. (Yang is, needless to say, a person of color.) Some of Adams’s surrogates went further, saying that Yang and Garcia are engaging in “voter suppression” and trying to “disenfranchise Black voters.”

On the cusp of an election that will determine the future of post-Covid New York, it feels as if we’re staggering toward catastrophe. Both of the male front-runners are, for different reasons, unsuited to the office. New York cannot afford a leader who doesn’t know how to do the job. It can’t afford a mayor who has, as The Times reported, repeatedly pushed “the boundaries of campaign-finance and ethics laws,” and could spend four years mired in scandal, using race to deflect every criticism. Among the leading candidates, our only hope lies with the women, Garcia and Maya Wiley.

This is the kind of stuff that makes it hard to take the arguments from Democrats about election reform seriously, when officials lie about it without penalty.

[Tami]

It may take a while due to the effects of ranked choice voting.

This also changes campaign strategies, as it makes sense for candidates to work together.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/o...ey-garcia.html

Frontrunner Eric Adams suggests there's some racism behind that. Elected officials advocating on his behalf suggest that any coordination is akin to voter suppression.

This is the kind of stuff that makes it hard to take the arguments from Democrats about election reform seriously, when officials lie about it without penalty.

Sounds like someone for WBE's April Fools list.

[Mister Mets]

Sounds like someone for WBE's April Fools list.

Adams has some issues.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...oral-race.html

New York magazine has a spotlight on his record. He was not a great state senator.

Once in Albany, Adams developed a reputation as one of the most camera-ready, charismatic members of the State Senate. He helped lead the charge against the practice of stop and frisk in the Bloomberg era and worked on anti-gang and anti-gun initiatives. But he also made his colleagues cringe with embarrassment, like the time he started a campaign to get teenage boys to pull their pants up or released a PSA teaching parents how to search their children’s baby dolls for guns or drugs.

Adams had an eye for where the power centers were and knew what powerful politicians needed, but he also made some problematic associations. He developed a close friendship with Hiram Monserrate, another ex-cop with a devoted following in his district in Queens. Monserrate threw the state government into chaos in June 2009, when, along with fellow Democrat Pedro Espada, he bolted the conference and joined the Republicans in an attempt to shift control of the Senate.

Former colleagues of theirs said that Adams and Monserrate bonded over the fact that they were both former cops. After Monserrate was arrested in December 2008 for slashing his girlfriend in the face with a piece of glass, Adams claimed that police were railroading Monserrate because he, like Adams, had been a reformer inside the department. As State Senate Democrats debated what to do about Monserrate and launched a four-month investigation into the incident, behind closed doors Adams became one of his most vociferous defenders. “He was just so dismissive of the fact that any of us thought this was a serious issue,” one lawmaker said. “It made my skin crawl.”

There's a telling anecdote about him and my former state senator.

Adams was treated with such suspicion by his fellow Democratic lawmakers that one senator, Shirley Huntley of Queens, started taping her conversations with him while she was under investigation for corruption, hoping that she could use them to stave off any jail time. Huntley was sentenced to a year in jail; she recently reappeared at the opening of Adams’s Queens campaign headquarters.

His supporters don't help the party in trivializing the problem of voter suppression. I agree with one point that "Democrats screaming "voter suppression" days before a Democratic primary -- in context of a system that voters passed overwhelmingly a year ago -- undermines legitimate instances of voter suppression occurring around the country."

He has had some pushback, although mainly from political rivals.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/n...mid=tw-nytimes

Two leading Democrats running for mayor moved on Monday to pre-emptively defend the results of Tuesday’s ranked-choice election, a day after allies of Eric Adams, another top candidate, suggested without evidence that an alliance between Kathryn Garcia and Andrew Yang amounted to voter suppression — and as Mr. Adams himself continued to criticize the alignment.

“This partnership is not racist and we should not be using this term so loosely against other candidates,” said the candidate Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio. “These accusations are a weaponization of real fears and concerns about our democracy, and have no place here.”

Ms. Wiley also warned against making false claims of voter suppression when Republicans across the United States are promoting restrictions on voting rights.

“Already, tens of thousands of New Yorkers have voted, and many thousands more will vote tomorrow,” she said. “At a time when this country is seeing real voter suppression laws being enacted, using racism charges to undermine confidence in ranked-choice voting is cynical, self-interested and dangerous.”

New York’s only citywide Black elected official, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, a supporter of Ms. Wiley, echoed her comments.

“It is disingenuous and dangerous to play on the very real and legitimate fears of bigotry and voter disenfranchisement by pretending it’s present where it’s not,” he said in a statement.

[CSTowle]

‘Italygate’ election conspiracy theory was pushed by two firms led by woman who also falsely claimed $30 million mansion was hers

Of all the Q nonsense Italygate is my favorite. It's the point where I wondered if whoever was in charge of feeding these idiots got bored and was truly f##king with them. Like, "They will literally believe anything we tell them. Here, I'll show you. Pick a country that gives the least amount of f##ks about American politics but these yokels might still have heard of. Aaaaand-send. There, now Italy is behind a coup to overthrow our Dear Leader."

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Of all the Q nonsense Italygate is my favorite. It's the point where I wondered if whoever was in charge of feeding these idiots got bored and was truly f##king with them. Like, "They will literally believe anything we tell them. Here, I'll show you. Pick a country that gives the least amount of f##ks about American politics but these yokels might still have heard of. Aaaaand-send. There, now Italy is behind a coup to overthrow our Dear Leader."

Yeah, these Q loons will swallow practically anything. I'm waiting for some clever snarkmaster to post a story about how a certain over the top dictator from a fictional Eastern European country that begins with "L" was also plotting against Trump. The tinfoil nutters would believe that too.

[worstblogever]

Sounds like someone for WBE's April Fools list.

A State Senator? Hmmm... maybe.

[worstblogever]

Seriously, reeeeeeeally? Add it to the list, WBE

Abbott's individual list is impressive, but when you're so "small government" that you veto even the simplest of bills against animal cruelty because you loathe regulation...

Just, goddamn, man.

I wish he wanted to curtail animal cruelty with the same zeal he wants to regulate/outlaw abortion.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of South Carolina State Senator Danny Verdin, a terribly conservative member of that body who did not come to our attention because he believes in banning abortion without exceptions for rape and incest, not for his support of allowing concealed firearms in establishments that serve alcohol, not because he voted for an attempt to nullify the Affordable Care Act in his state, and not because he loves Voter ID legislation that disenfranchises hundreds of thousands of voters. No, what gets our attention more about Danny Verdin is the hard-on he has for the Confederacy, as he is closely affiliated with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, having once served as president of their South Carolina chapter, and that he also helped organize protests to the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina state grounds back in 2000 with the white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens.

And don’t think for a moment that Verdin separates his hobbies from his political interests one bit, as he has spoken on the floor of the South Carolina legislature and invoked the attack on Fort Sumter with pride. Verdin would also like the 14th Amendment of our Constitution repealed, referring to immigrants being granted citizenship as a “malady” or “poison” upon the country. It should come as little surprise, then, that even after the assassination of Reverend Clementa Pinckney and several of his flock at the Emanuel AME Church by a shooter motivated by Confederate imagery to commit a hate crime, when the state legislature voted to remove the Confederate flag from state grounds… well, Danny Verdin wanted it kept around. Even the assassination of one of his colleagues was not enough to deter his ardor for a racist emblem from a rebellion against the United States based on people not wanting to give up their slaves.

Verdin is also ethically challenged, as within the past several years he tried passing two separate pieces of legislation that would specifically aid his private business as a veterinarian into the South Carolina legislature, including mandatory testing upon hogs before transport, and to shut down mobile vet clinics (that compete with his own non-mobile clinic). Most lawmakers would recuse themselves on a vote on a bill like this if one came up, but to introduce it oneself is about as crooked as it gets. Now, here's the depressing part... we had hoped that in the wake of the shooting in Charleston, a challenger to Danny Verdin would emerge in 2016, and hold his feet to the fire regarding his unstoppable urge to drape himself in the Ol' Stars &Bars That left him in the legislature so he can do things like sponsor legislation to bring back the firing squad as a method of execution in South Carolina, and vote for fetal heartbeat abortion legislation that would outlaw abortion at six weeks and doesn’t even considering whether or not the child was conceived through rape or incest.

Again, it’s now 2020, and no challenger has emerged to Danny Verdin for his State Senate seat, so this throwback to the gray side of the Civil War will remain a fixture in South Carolina politics and serve District 9 as a State Senator until at least 2024. Which of course, returned him to the state capitol to do what else… to co-sponsor a fetal heartbeat abortion bill that effectively bans the procedure at 6 weeks, and threatens the Roe v. Wade ruling. Because he care so much about “life”.

Meanwhile, within the same calendar season this year the mother***er can vote to make the electric chair the default method of execution in the state, and vote to forbid businesses from firing employees who refuse to get vaccinated to continue work.

Again, because he cares so much about “LIFE”

[The Cool Thatguy]

Of all the Q nonsense Italygate is my favorite. It's the point where I wondered if whoever was in charge of feeding these idiots got bored and was truly f##king with them. Like, "They will literally believe anything we tell them. Here, I'll show you. Pick a country that gives the least amount of f##ks about American politics but these yokels might still have heard of. Aaaaand-send. There, now Italy is behind a coup to overthrow our Dear Leader."

They probably just threw a dart at a map to see how stupid their followers might be.

[Mister Mets]

A State Senator? Hmmm... maybe.

He's the Brooklyn borough president and frontrunner for mayor of New York City.