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

[shooshoomanjoe]

DeSantis threating to defund schools over mask mandates is the height of insanity for the GOP. How can any reasonable person not be ashamed/embarrassed to call themselves a republican?

[WestPhillyPunisher]

DeSantis threating to defund schools over mask mandates is the height of insanity for the GOP. How can any reasonable person not be ashamed/embarrassed to call themselves a republican?

Because owning the libs and making Biden look bad due to a surge of COVID cases is everything to nutbag Qpublicans. As for DeathSantis, like I said before, he has to stay the course and kill as many Floridians, young, old and inbetween as humanly possible in order to stay in the good graces of The Former Guy. Nothing more complicated than that.

[Mister Mets]

DeSantis threating to defund schools over mask mandates is the height of insanity for the GOP. How can any reasonable person not be ashamed/embarrassed to call themselves a republican?

He's not threatening to defund the schools. He's saying he'll dock the pay of superintendents and school members who decline to follow state policy.

[worstblogever]

Alright, for anyone interested...

The CSGOPOTD Trump 2021 update is complete (NOW WITH SEDITION!)

I'm just going to link to the Dailykos post, because... well, frankly, Trump was enough of a deranged, corpulent pile of corruption, conspiracies and lies moving to incite an insurrection that it would take up like 6-10 posts, minimum, to list it all. And the past six months have been mostly quiet since he got banned from Twitter.

[worstblogever]

He's not threatening to defund the schools. He's saying he'll dock the pay of superintendents and school members who decline to follow state policy.

So he's just a slightly different kind of malicious ***hole pushing educators to give kids Covid-19 than described.

Bickering over the nuance doesn't change that fact.

[babyblob]

He's not threatening to defund the schools. He's saying he'll dock the pay of superintendents and school members who decline to follow state policy.

So is that better? he is threatening the pay and lively hood of Superintendents and School board members who dare defy him and protect children. How is that any better? I get the tittle of the link is misleading but what He is threatening is not at all better.

[Jack Dracula]

Dominion Voting Systems hits conservative networks, Trump ally with $1.6 billion defamation suits

Dominion finishing up the latest round of suits against the Conservative outlets and commentators.

I hope they win all of them and at least get massive settlements. No lawyer but its plain as day that these outlets are extremely shady and over the line promoting obvious lies.

I honestly think this will be the best Avenue to combat the spread of the big lie by corrupt mainstream media and politicians. Just sue the hell out of them.

[worstblogever]

So is that better? he is threatening the pay and lively hood of Superintendents and School board members who dare defy him and protect children. How is that any better? I get the tittle of the link is misleading but what He is threatening is not at all better.

It isn't.

It's almost like he's the sort of fascist douche who would send the cops to raid the home of a scientist who dared study what his idiocy has wrought on the state, and have those cops point guns at her kids.

And if Republicans don't wake up and stop being clueless enough to reflexively defend their own when they're visibly converting to fascism, and support people who aren't, they're going to be in a fascist party.

You'd think some folks would pick up on that by now. Especially after January 6th.

[BeastieRunner]

Alright, for anyone interested...

The CSGOPOTD Trump 2021 update is complete (NOW WITH SEDITION!)

I'm just going to link to the Dailykos post, because... well, frankly, Trump was enough of a deranged, corpulent pile of corruption, conspiracies and lies moving to incite an insurrection that it would take up like 6-10 posts, minimum, to list it all. And the past six months have been mostly quiet since he got banned from Twitter.

When do you meet with an oncologist?

[worstblogever]

When do you meet with an oncologist?

Monday. But I work in a hospital, so that's a lot of days.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

It isn't.

It's almost like he's the sort of fascist douche who would send the cops to raid the home of a scientist who dared study what his idiocy has wrought on the state, and have those cops point guns at her kids.

And if Republicans don't wake up and stop being clueless enough to reflexively defend their own when they're visibly converting to fascism, and support people who aren't, they're going to be in a fascist party.

You'd think some folks would pick up on that by now. Especially after January 6th.

I'm of the belief Qpublicans are very much awake about all of this. Not only are they not clueless about their party slip-sliding into outright fascism, they're WELCOMING IT! Right wingers realize this is the last best chance they have to regain power, and they're all too willing to rob, cheat, lie and steal to get the job done. They saw that the 1/6 insurrection didn't work as planned, so the GQP is taking the non-violent approach with voter suppression bills and other antics that would negate the importance of the votes we cast if elections don't go the way they want them. Qpublicans don't give a **** about democracy, perhaps they never have, they're just more out in the open about it now, they don't want to govern, they want to rule, and they'll destroy everything this country stands for to accomplish that goal.

[AnakinFlair]

Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan signs arrest warrants for absent Democrats in bid to end chamber’s weekslong stalemate



They have made a stand and made the nation take notice that they are willing to fight voter disenfranchisement any way possible. They did the right thing imploring DC and the federal government for the past few weeks to do something Federally.

Sadly one way or another this Texas bill was going to pass. They couldn't just drop their lives and live in DC forever. The GOP is relentless in their efforts to make minority votes as difficult as possible. With all the other issues Texas has at the moment that that is the NUMBER 1 speaks volumes

I thought a judge had squashed those warrants? I remember hearing last week that some of those Texas Democrats were going back, now that they didn't have to worry about being arrested.

[Mister Mets]

So is that better? he is threatening the pay and lively hood of Superintendents and School board members who dare defy him and protect children. How is that any better? I get the tittle of the link is misleading but what He is threatening is not at all better.

It would be harmful to students if he cut school funding. That would be worse.

There is an argument for DeSantis's approach. The problem with Coronavirus has gotten better, as all adults have had the option of getting the vaccine. Florida's vaccination rate is better than that of Nevada, Michigan and Illinois (this may be very well due to Florida having a higher percentage of older people.)

Prioritizing education is reasonable. In America, the percentage of students testing at grade level and those who finish high school ready to begin a four-year college is way too low, and for every compromise we make on the quality of education, children are less able to reach their potential. These are important things for all officials to consider.

There is a procedural question of whether DeSantis has the ability to penalize administrators this way. Whatever power is given to people to reject a policy you disagree with will be used by people to reject policies you agree with.

There is the question of whether it obviously makes sense to have kids war masks at school. It is one thing to ask people to wear masks when indoors for short periods of time, like when they're inside a store, or to ask adult professionals to wear masks at their job. It is another to insist that all children wear masks throughout the day at school. This is especially true at a time when the effectiveness of cloth masks (as opposed to N95 masks) against the Delta Variant is debated, and this is before we consider an environment in which groups of people are in a room together for at least a quarter of the day.

https://www.sfgate.com/shopping/arti...9-16376884.php

[Mister Mets]

It isn't.

It's almost like he's the sort of fascist douche who would send the cops to raid the home of a scientist who dared study what his idiocy has wrought on the state, and have those cops point guns at her kids.

And if Republicans don't wake up and stop being clueless enough to reflexively defend their own when they're visibly converting to fascism, and support people who aren't, they're going to be in a fascist party.

You'd think some folks would pick up on that by now. Especially after January 6th.

That story was misreported.

From an earlier post...
https://community.cbr.com/showthread...es#post5541398

Charles CW Cooke of the National Review looked at publicly available data on Rebekah Jones, the data scientist claiming the Ron DeSantis administration fudged the numbers on Covid. He says she has made demonstrably false claims.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/...wer-who-wasnt/

https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...-of-deception/

Initially, she was placed on an internal counseling program after numerous violations, including potentially exposing personnel data, and changing data in infographics meant to be released officially.

Jones’s bad behavior was first formally reported on May 6, 2020, when the IT director at the FDOH, Craig Curry, emailed the department’s labor-relations consultant, Tiffany Hicks, “looking for guidance” on “properly documenting actions of one of my employees and to get guidance on proper preparation in case action needs to be taken.” Among the “actions” that Curry sought to “document” were that the employee—Rebekah Jones—had written “posts on website [sic] and social media regarding data and web product owned by the Department that she works on without permission of management or communications”; that she had released infographics that “should have been identical to data published by our communication department” but were not; and, most seriously, that she had possibly exposed “personnel data” in the process. Asked to clarify the problem by Hicks, Curry confirmed that between April 9 and April 30, 2020, he had verbally told Jones to stop talking to the press without permission, and, more specifically, that he had told her to stop releasing health-department data or representing her employer without consent.

In her response to Curry, sent later that day, Hicks proposed one of two actions: that Jones should either be “separated” (i.e., fired) or else be put through a “Management Counseling” procedure that would “address and document the recent incidents.” The latter process, Hicks explained, “would be informal and would not be placed in the employee’s personnel file.” But “if similar behavior continues,” she added, “it is a [sic] management’s decision to move forward with termination.” Apparently, the department chose the second action, because, by the end of the day, Jones was still working at the FDOH, albeit in a slightly altered role. In his notes, Curry records that, having been “instructed by management to replace Ms. Jones as primary on the COVID Dashboard,” he called her “to notify her that she was being removed from her duties as primary GIS [geographic information system] developer on the department’s COVID-19 dashboard.” Again: This was not a termination. As Curry explicitly noted, Jones “was informed that she was maintaining her role as GIS team manager and was to resume normal day to day responsibilities, but she was to cease any duties and administrative roles associated with the COVID-19 GIS dashboard.”

Before she was fired, she crashed the Florida Department of Health online dashboard while trying to copy confidential information, and locked the manager's administrative privileges.

The next day, on May 7, 2020, Jones crashed the dashboard.

Without telling a single person what she was doing, Jones created a new account within the GIS system and moved a tranche of data into it. This both broke the setup and sincerely confused the department’s IT staff. “Because the team was not informed,” Curry wrote, it “began troubleshooting the issue as if it were a system issue”—which, of course, it was not. In the process, the FDOH asked Chris Duclos, a GIS manager and the only other person besides Jones who had “full administrative right [sic] in our system[,] to help.” This Duclos did, primarily “by modifying ownership of objects to return the process to the previous state”—that is, to roll back the system to how it had been when it was working. At 1:00 p.m. that day, aware that Duclos was reversing her power grab, Jones locked Duclos out of his account.

By 1:35 p.m. on the same day, Jones had been instructed to restore Duclos’s full administrative access. Six and a half hours later, at 8:08, she responded by saying that she would, and then, at 8:28, added that she intended to leave Florida to spend some time with her family in Mississippi. Except . . . she didn’t. Instead, as Curry recorded, Jones set Duclos’s permissions to a lower level than administrator, and left herself as the sole person within the FDOH who had administrator status. In response, Duclos emailed the state’s GIS vendor and re*quested that his full permissions be restored. This was done.

Then came a lull. Having been asked what on earth she was doing, Jones claimed that she had set herself up as the sole administrator as the result of “security concerns,” and, under the impression that this excuse had been accepted by the department, she started playing nice. Two days later, Curry reported, “the entire team seemed to be getting along and moving forward.” At 9:30 a.m. on May 15, encouraged by the improvement in Jones’s behavior, and having got the dashboard back up and running, the FDOH decided that “Manage*ment Counseling was still the correct option for previous occurrences.” That decision would last for only a few hours: At 1:46 p.m., Jones sent a mass email to everyone who used the dashboard—many of whom were external to the department—explaining that she was no longer assigned to the dashboard and suggesting that she had been removed because she had refused to manipulate data. Within minutes, the press began crawling all over the story. Three days later, Jones was fired.

She lied about an encounter with the police, claiming they pointed at guns at her and her children, information contradicted by bodycam footage. Police wanted to question her about a data breach, traced back to her IPv6 address.

Late last year, the police did indeed execute a search warrant on Jones. But they did so because a data breach at the FDOH—in which the personal information of 19,000 employees was stolen—was traced back to the IPv6 address that Comcast had assigned to Jones’s house. Governor DeSantis had nothing to do with it. The search warrant—which alleges that Jones committed a felony by not only temporarily accessing personnel data she had no right to access but permanently stealing it—was initially signed by Judge Joshua Hawkes, a Republican appointee, but subsequently upheld by Judge John Cooper, an elected judge in heavily Democratic Leon County. (Florida does not have explicitly partisan judicial elections.)

Jones now claims that she was “terrified” by the police’s visit. But even this seems to be highly questionable. Not only did she prepare for the visit by creating a made-for-the-cameras sign that read “Biden hire me!”—hardly the instantaneous work of someone who is surprised that the cops are at the door—but she subsequently spread a host of extraordinary claims about the conduct of the police that, after festering online for a while and spawning a swiftly dropped lawsuit from Jones, were flatly disproven by the release of the body-camera footage. As the Tampa Bay Times recently noted, despite Jones’s having “claimed on Twitter that the agents ‘pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids,’” the bodycam video “does not appear to show police pointing their guns at anyone in the house.” On the contrary: It shows the police waiting outside patiently for 22 minutes; it shows them trying to minimize the disruption to her children by encouraging her to come and talk to them at the door; and it shows them repeatedly calling Jones to find out why she wasn’t cooperating. After the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) had released the footage, a spokesman confirmed what anyone who watches it can see: that at no point during the search did the agents point their guns at anyone in the house.

There's one more quote in the original post, but this was starting to exceed the character limit so I couldn't include it.

I can appreciate skepticism of a report in the National Review, although the reporting is largely on factual questions (IE- did her explanation of how police treated her contradict body cam footage? Did her actions cause IT complications?) Because there are so many factual claims if the National Review piece were substantially inaccurate, there would likely be a takedown of it at a respected left-wing or mainstream outlet.

[worstblogever]

That story was misreported.

There. Is. Video. Cops enter with guns drawn. She literally chastises them for pointing the gun at her kids on the video as it happens. Jones discussed what happened with multiple media outlets.

Try and not gaslight everyone today, please.

Or post the National Review gaslighting everyone and pretending you're not helping them do it, which is quickly becoming a habit of yours when you share sources even you admit are dubious.|


And not for nothing, it seems like you missed the part of what I posted earlier about people clueless enough to start defending Republicans embracing fascism and emboldening them to go further, because you're digging in and doing it right now. You defended DeSantis for threatening school funding and educator pay if they take steps to protect children from Covid-19, and now you're defending him for siccing the cops on the scientist who was reporting the true numbers as a whistleblower.

Fashion tip: Jackboots aren't fashionable, Mets. I mean, between this and your passionate insistence that Stephen Miller isn't a white nationalist, seeing a real pattern.