TrumpReich in action

[lennygoran]

I will always be grateful for their kindness,

Brian what a story-don't expect that kindness from trump-he's the absolute worst human being on the planet! Regards, Len

[barney]

Bit hot. Tasmania is the closest climate to New York, perhaps.

[maestrob]

That is such a sad story, Brian. Is it still the same today?
In Australia and New Zealand we have government-funded carers and/or nurses who come to the home to shower, dress, administer medication etc to people who need it. Of course there aren't enough of the carers, and our ageing population is going to stretch resources, but it's a good policy.

Yes, Barney, it is quite the same. Only those who have private "Long term care" insurance, which is now costing us $600+/month for one of us (I don't qualify because I became disabled at age 44), or who spend down all their life savings to qualify for Medicaid, would qualify for such help. Medicare, our program for Seniors, does not cover such help, so if were to need care, it would have to be paid for out of pocket or be provided by a family member.

Yet, in spite of this, Americans spend twice as much per capita on healthcare than any other advanced country.

[barney]

Well, to me from the outside, the problem is this weird antipathy to "socialised" medicine. In Australia we don't see the universal Medicare program as socialism; it just means people don't have to die or go bankrupt because they can't afford hospital. Not that our system is perfect, by any means.

[Belle]

Still on the old Trump obsessions I see. There used to be a gag in debating circles that if you had to refer to the Third Reich in your arguments you were losing!! I ran the school debating team and this was a rule of thumb.

[Rach3]

Still on the old Trump obsessions I see. There used to be a gag in debating circles that if you had to refer to the Third Reich in your arguments you were losing!! I ran the school debating team and this was a rule of thumb.

At that time, no one could or would believe there could ever be another Third Reich as no one could or would believe a Donald Trump could or would be elected President.

[barney]

Still on the old Trump obsessions I see. There used to be a gag in debating circles that if you had to refer to the Third Reich in your arguments you were losing!! I ran the school debating team and this was a rule of thumb.

A heck of a lot more reasonable than your obsession with the ABC and all your fashionable culture warrior causes.

I believe you are referring to Godwin's Law, though it probably post-dates your school debating. The idea itself can clearly precede Godwin.

Wiki: Godwin's law, short for Godwin's law (or rule) of Nazi analogies,[1][2] is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Adolf Hitler becomes more likely.[2][3]

Promulgated by the American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990,[2] Godwin's law originally referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions.[4] He stated that he introduced Godwin's law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics.[2] It is now applied to any threaded online discussion, such as Internet forums, chat rooms, and comment threads, as well as to speeches, articles, and other rhetoric[5][6] where reductio ad Hitlerum occurs.

[Rach3]

US Marshalls defy a Federal Judge ; South Dakota bright red of course:

WAPO,6/15

A federal judge leveled criminal contempt charges Monday against senior federal law enforcement officials in a long-simmering standoff in South Dakota over the judge’s insistence that he needs to know whether deputies guarding his courtroom have been vaccinated against the coronavirus.

U.S. District Judge Charles Kornmann, who sits in Aberdeen, tore into the U.S. Marshals Service for nearly an hour over their reaction to his decision at a hearing last month to question the deputy marshal in attendance about whether she had been vaccinated.

The deputy marshal, according to the judge, refused to answer the question, at which point he ordered her out of his courtroom. The marshals, in turn, took three of the defendants scheduled for hearings that day out of the courthouse. That infuriated the judge, who describes that act as a “kidnapping” that obstructed the work of the court.

“This was such an outrageous thing to do,” the judge said at a hearing Monday, during which he spent nearly an hour laying out his rationale for accusing the three Marshals Service officials of criminal contempt and obstruction. “Nothing like this that we could find has ever been done in this country. If it is the marshals’ position that they can override court orders, they are badly mistaken.”

The judge’s decision to accuse senior federal law enforcement officials of committing crimes impeding the administration of justice is a remarkable rift not just within federal law enforcement, but for the close working relationship with the judges who run the courts and the marshals who guard them. It also highlights the degree to which no workplace is immune from fights and disagreements surrounding coronavirus safety and vaccinations.
Historically, Congress gives the marshals wide legal authority to make security decisions surrounding the federal judiciary, but the marshals are also typically deferential to the requests and demands of judges.

A spokesman for the Marshals Service declined to comment, citing the ongoing criminal case against some of its officials.

The judge noted that he had made his concerns clear in writing well ahead of the courtroom confrontation, and said his own staff had suggested that the marshals might have planned the confrontation.

The three accused of contempt are John Kilgallon, chief of staff for the U.S. Marshals Service in Washington, D.C., Daniel Mosteller, the marshal for the District of South Dakota, and Stephen Houghtaling, the chief deputy for that district.

“Each of you is charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, contempt of court,” said the judge, setting a Sept. 13 trial date, and requesting that the U.S. attorney’s office prosecute the case. If the office declines, the judge said, he would appoint a prosecutor.

Justice Department lawyers said little during the hearing, noting that the three men were in the process of hiring criminal defense lawyers.

The battle between the federal judge and the U.S. Marshals Service had been brewing since March, when Kornmann wrote a letter to federal officials saying that he expected to know whether people working in his courtroom had been vaccinated against the coronavirus.

“We are not talking about politics or conspiracy theories. We are talking about science and protecting all of us who serve the public here as well as the jurors, lawyers and parties who come to this building,” Kornmann wrote. “If you are refusing to take the vaccines, I want to know that so I can decide what further action is required on my part.”

The marshals further drew the ire of the judge when the agency defended its position of not telling him whether individual deputies had been vaccinated by claiming that the agency itself does not know — that it has anonymous data about the percentage of vaccinated employees, but does not know individual deputies’ vaccination status. That answer raised questions among some employees, who, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal correspondence, said they filled out paperwork for their supervisors identifying themselves as vaccinated. In the beginning of the year, some marshals employees uploaded copies of their vaccination cards.

“The USMS takes seriously its court security responsibilities and places the highest priority on maintaining the safety and security of those involved in the judicial process,” Kilgallon wrote to the judge last month.

He wrote that marshals’ offices around the country are down to only about 69 percent of their deputies. “This severe staffing shortage contributes to the limited number of trials and hearings which can be supported simultaneously.” Kilgallon also argued that any widespread court order that the deputies who provide security in federal courtrooms must be vaccinated “may negatively impact the ability of courts to conduct their business when such security is required.”
‘
The judge said he found the marshals’ arguments disingenuous, and branded some of them simply false — such as the claim that one of the defendants in court on the day of the confrontation was a murderer. The judge said the defendant in question did have a prior manslaughter conviction, but added that there was a major difference between manslaughter and murder, and the defendant was in court that day on a relatively minor probation violation.

“I had always thought that the principal responsibilities of the Marshals Service was the protection of the federal judiciary,” Kornmann wrote. “As it stands now, they could well be the most dangerous people in the courtroom.”

At the start of the conflict, Kornmann said he was considering civil contempt findings against the marshals officials. At the hearing Monday, he told Justice Department lawyers that they had successfully convinced him he could not seek civil monetary penalties, and that he would therefore pursue criminal sanctions.

Devlin Barrett writes about the FBI and the Justice Department, and is the author of "October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election." He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for National Reporting, for coverage of Russian interference in the U.S. election.

[maestrob]

OMG!

The poison has really infiltrated the ranks, hasn't it?

Those marshals that took the three witnesses out of the courtroom, and the one who refused to state her vaccine status, should all be terminated immediately, with prejudice. They have no business ever being in a courtroom again. Ever.

[Rach3]

From NYT:

Corporate America Forgives the Sedition Caucus
June 16, 2021


By Michelle Cottle
Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.

The swamp is healing.

The early months of 2021 were rough for many members of Congress, as they confronted every politician’s worst nightmare: a major disruption to the usually reliable gusher of corporate campaign cash.

Following the Jan. 6 sacking of the U.S. Capitol by MAGA zealots high on Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud, a host of corporate PACs and industry groups announced reviews of their policies on political giving. From Bank of America to Disney, from Microsoft to Raytheon to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, many of the nation’s big donors hit the pause button. Some suspended all contributions to congressional races. Others drew up a more targeted “no-fly” list featuring members of the so-called Sedition Caucus, the 147 Republicans who voted on Jan. 6 to overturn the election results.

Further squelching the money flow, the coronavirus pandemic halted most in-person fund-raisers and other opportunities for lawmakers and favor seekers to hang out. Even if everyone puts on their best smiles — and pants — Zoom cocktail parties are a sad and sorry substitute for the usual parade of steak dinners, fishing trips, golf outings and other face-to-face schmooze fests. In the first quarter of 2021, corporate giving plummeted to individual members and campaign committees alike.

But as the election and pandemic traumas fade, corporate America is easing, quietly, back into the giving game. Lobbyists are suiting up. Fund-raising events are on the calendar. Wallets are reopening. It will take a while yet for the giving to return to its normal, obscene levels, but the trajectory is once more headed up — with the trend expected to accelerate in the coming months.

Rising vaccination rates and loosening Covid restrictions are only part of the picture here. More and more companies, after much soul-searching, are concluding that most Republicans have learned their lesson and been punished enough for Jan. 6. LOL. More likely, companies have concluded that the public outrage over the attack has subsided enough that they can resume currying favor with Republicans without too much blowback from shareholders and customers. After all, the Capitol was sacked more than five months ago. That’s an eternity in political time.

A new analysis by CQ Roll Call crunches the latest campaign finance data and reveals some of the notable players who have loosened the purse strings in recent weeks. For instance, reports Roll Call, “the top business and industry PACs contributing to the 147 G.O.P. lawmakers were major defense contractors such as General Dynamics, as well as Duke Energy, American Crystal Sugar Company and PACs connected with the Associated Builders and Contractors and the National Association of Realtors.”

As one industry player resumes donations, the path gets cleared — and the pressure increases — for others to follow suit. Morgan Stanley’s PAC resumed giving in February, while the American Bankers Association PAC did so in March, noted Reuters. Citigroup announced earlier this month that its PAC will resume contributions on a case-by-case basis. Similarly, JPMorgan will restart its PAC giving, although the company reportedly will steer clear of the Sedition Caucus — for now. After the midterms, the financial giant will revisit its decision, according to Reuters.

To be clear, corporate contributions never dried up entirely. Their professed passion for democracy notwithstanding, plenty of companies and trade groups were even more passionate about not endangering their special friendships with lawmakers. And nothing makes lawmakers friendlier than campaign cash.

Last month, a report by the government watchdog group CREW noted that, although PAC donations were way down in the three months following the Jan. 6 attack, “170 business PACs — some of which had previously committed to stop giving” — still donated over “$2.6 million to campaigns, leadership PACs and party committees allied with” the Sedition Caucus.


The Republican Party’s main House and Senate campaign committees — the N.R.C.C. and the N.R.S.C. — pulled in “a combined $1.7 million from PACs tied to more than 57 companies and industry groups,” according to CREW. Contributors included “household names like Pfizer, Intel, T-Mobile and CVS, as well as PACs tied to trade groups that represent industries as varied as real estate, mortgage banking and insurance agents.”

It seems worth noting that the head of the N.R.S.C., Senator Rick Scott of Florida, was one of eight Senate Republicans to vote to overturn the election results even after the attack on the Capitol.

Of the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election results, CREW found that at least 103 had benefited from corporate cash. Representative Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania topped the list of recipients, having pulled in $44,000 from a range of corporations and industry groups, including John Deere and the National Chicken Council. Coming in at No. 2 was Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer, the Missouri Republican who reportedly threatened to create an enemies list of any companies that put him on their do-not-contribute lists. And, of course, Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, has continued to raise corporate cash for both his own campaign and his leadership PAC, albeit at far lower levels than usual.

Indeed, part of what makes the Jan. 6 dilemma so awkward for donors is that it is not merely fringe-dwelling backbenchers who have been complicit in Donald Trump’s election-fraud lies. Powerful Republican leaders have been a key part of the problem as well. Denying them contributions carries even greater risks.

The further Jan. 6 recedes from view, of course, the more that Corporate America will deem it less risky to donate than to not. As any savvy politician can tell you, the attention span of the American public is short. Without constant stoking, widespread outrage fades quickly — or is replaced by the next outrage. Just ask gun control advocates, who know too well how quickly the public, and politicians, move on from mass shootings.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why more and more industry givers already feel comfortable asking what, to many people, will sound like a totally outrageous question: Is it really fair to keep punishing congressional Republicans simply because their party attempted to undermine American democracy?

[Rach3]

NYT
Greg Sargent op ed
June 17, 2021 at 9:53 a.m. CDT

“When 21 House Republicans voted against honoring the police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6, a number of them offered a wretched but revealing excuse: The measure defined what happened as an “insurrection,” and this must not be permitted.

The Republican effort to rewrite the history of the insurrection has taken many forms, but at its core is something very fundamental. It’s an effort to deny that Donald Trump actually did incite a mob of his supporters to employ intimidation and violence for the express purpose of overturning the outcome of a free and fair election, to seize a second term as president illegitimately.

Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, one of those 21 Republicans, had an extraordinary encounter with D.C. police officer Michael Fanone in the Capitol on Wednesday that unmasks the deeper pathologies driving that effort to sanitize Jan. 6 in a new and unsettling way.

The Post has now interviewed Fanone and obtained new details about the encounter. Fanone, who was injured on Jan. 6 and has since been harshly critical of Republicans, says he boarded a Capitol elevator with Clyde and extended a hand.
Clyde — who recently went viral for likening Jan. 6 to a “normal tourist visit” — declined to shake hands, claiming not to know Fanone’s identity. Fanone then introduced himself as a “police officer” who “fought to defend the Capitol,” and described his injuries. Whereupon this happened:

“His response was nothing,” Fanone said. “He turned away from me, pulled out his cellphone and started thumbing through the apps.”
Fanone said Clyde turned on the camera app but did not point the phone in his direction. Fanone said he believes Clyde was trying to record audio of the encounter.
“After that, I just simply stood there,” Fanone said.
He said Clyde bolted when the doors opened.

One of the most widely echoed hot takes on all this is that Republicans are prioritizing Trump over the police who protect them. Another is that Republicans only honor cops selectively, particularly when Black Lives Matter activists are protesting against them.
But something much more elemental is at play here. Why is Fanone such a problem for Republicans?

Because Fanone is demonstrating with uncommon clarity that at a basic level, a large swath of Republicans, in aligning themselves with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, also aligned themselves with lawlessness and civic breakdown, against democratic stability and the rule of law.

This is the fundamental truth that Republicans want to erase from public memory. Fanone has made this a lot harder: He has done numerous high-profile interviews denouncing Republican efforts to rewrite this history, calling them “lies” and “bulls--t.”

Clyde, to be sure, represents a particularly malevolent strain of this effort to rewrite the history of Jan. 6. His “normal tourist visit” nonsense is up there with other similarly disgusting claims: that the rioters were “peaceful patriots,” that there’s no clear proof they were Trump supporters, that Trump didn’t actually incite them, that Black Lives Matter activists are far more threatening.

Plenty of Republicans have not gone to such ugly places. Some Republicans have even been willing to blame Trump for inciting the attack, though they have tended to go mute since then.

But Clyde’s posture is widely shared among Republicans in a more fundamental sense. Like Clyde, a very large number of Republicans are devoted to maintaining the impression that it’s not all that crazy for GOP voters to believe there just might be something suspect about the 2020 results.
Clyde was one of the Georgia Republicans who falsely suggested there had been widespread election fraud in his state. But many other Republicans are in the same basic place.
About 140 House Republicans voted to invalidate President Biden’s electors. Republicans everywhere keep suggesting GOP voters are right to lack “confidence” in the 2020 outcome and in our election system. Republicans in numerous states are using this claim to justify an escalation in voter suppression tactics. Republicans are happy to allow sham examinations of the vote to continue in Arizona and Georgia, and Republicans are taking those efforts to other states.

In other words, very much like Clyde, much of the GOP not only actively fed the belief that a grand injustice had been done, which helped inspire the attack on the Capitol; they want those pathologies in some sense to live on.

And this has worked. As William Saletan’s review of polling shows, many Republican voters are still deeply in thrall to those pathologies.

Fanone is a walking embodiment of the horror that unfolded when a mob of Trump supporters acted on perceptions of that invented injustice, perceptions that much of the GOP is responsible for helping to create.
For obvious reasons, Fanone is a highly sympathetic figure, which is why he’s such an effective messenger in this regard. But he has also been effective because he’s telling large truths, and everyone knows it. Which is exactly why Clyde ran away from him. “

Meanwhile, back at the Arizona GOP’s “ fraudit” :

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/202 ... -politics/

[maestrob]

The beat goes on.

Never forget who these guys are.

It would not be in our national interest to do so.

[Rach3]

Why G.O.P.-Led States Are Banning the Police From Enforcing Federal Gun Laws

Missouri is the latest state to throw down a challenge to the enforcement of federal firearms laws as Republicans seek to thwart President Biden’s gun control proposals.

By Glenn Thrush and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
June 18, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET , NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/us/m ... e=Homepage

Missouri has become the latest state to throw down a broad challenge to the enforcement of federal firearms laws, as Republican-controlled state legislatures intensify their fierce political counterattack against President Biden’s gun control proposals.

A bill signed by Gov. Mike Parson over the weekend — at a gun store called Frontier Justice — threatens a penalty of $50,000 against any local police agency that enforces certain federal gun laws and regulations that constitute “infringements” of Second Amendment gun rights.

At least eight other states — Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia — have taken similar action this year, passing laws of varying strength that discourage or prohibit the enforcement of federal gun statutes by state and local agents and officers.

The new law “is about protecting law-abiding Missourians against government overreach and unconstitutional federal mandates,” Mr. Parson and the attorney general, Eric Schmitt, said in a letter defending the law on Thursday to the U.S. Justice Department. They said the state would “reject any attempt by the federal government to circumvent the fundamental right Missourians have to keep and bear arms to protect themselves and their property.”

In interviews, the sponsors of the bill in the Missouri House and Senate acknowledged that the law would most likely have little immediate effect on the current operations of local and state police agencies, since there is presently little difference between state and federal gun laws in Missouri.

There would be no change to the federal requirement for background checks before buying guns from licensed firearms dealers, they said, and local police officers could still aid in federal gun law enforcement operations as long as the person being targeted was also violating a state law.

The Republican lawmakers said their main intent was to guard against the potential of more wide-ranging legislation from Washington, where Democratic lawmakers have proposed a major expansion of federal background checks, an extension of the time period in which federal officials can review purchases and bills to restrict the sale of popular semiautomatic weapons like AR-15s.

“Missouri law almost mirrors federal law currently,” said Representative Jered Taylor, who sponsored the bill in the Missouri House. “So really I think the concern is what’s next — what’s coming down the road from the federal government?”

With Congress in the hands of Democrats, pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association are turning to the states. A growing number of Republican-sponsored gun bills are making their way through state legislatures, all with the purpose of easing restrictions and oversight in anticipation of Mr. Biden’s next moves.

Among the most significant are new laws in Tennessee, Iowa and Texas that now allow most adults to carry firearms without a permit.

Some states are pushing through all-in-one packages. Earlier this year, Gov. Greg Gianforte of Montana, a Republican, signed an extensive relaxation of the state’s gun laws, including a provision that allows guns to be carried onto university campuses and into the State Capitol.

Critics say the concept enshrined in the new Missouri law and others like it — state laws that attempt to undermine federal ones — is a legally shaky but politically potent strategy deployed in the past in the South to resist antislavery and civil rights laws.

“The fire was really lit under my Republican colleagues when Biden was elected — we’re back to the whole they-are-coming-for-your-guns thing we saw under Obama,” said State Representative Tracy McCreery, a Democrat from the St. Louis area who opposed the bill.

There is a widespread view among legal scholars, and even some supporters of the so-called Second Amendment Sanctuary strategy, that any attempt to supersede federal law would violate a clause of the Constitution that says federal law takes precedence over conflicting state laws. In West Virginia, where a law similar to Missouri’s went into effect in May, the state’s Republican attorney general created a legal defense team to coincide with its enactment.

Missouri’s law is not merely symbolic, Ms. McCreery said, and could make local law enforcement officials “think twice” before fully cooperating with federal law enforcement agencies on, for example, a gun trafficking case being investigated under a federal firearms law that was more stringent than Missouri’s laws.

“A fine of $50,000 for a rural sheriff or a police officer is a huge threat,” she said.

On Wednesday, Brian M. Boynton, an assistant attorney general who leads the Justice Department’s civil division, wrote to Missouri officials asking them to clarify several aspects of the law by Friday, including whether it was intended to block the use of the national background check system or to prevent local police officers from asking federal agents to trace a gun.

“The public safety of the people of the United States and citizens of Missouri is paramount,” Mr. Boynton wrote.

In their response, Governor Parson and the attorney general said they were not trying to nullify federal laws but were instead keeping local police officers from being used to enforce those laws. They said they would not allow the federal government to “tell Missourians how to live our lives.”

The bill’s supporters said they were adopting a strategy that has been used frequently for liberal causes, such as “sanctuary city” laws that prohibit local officers from enforcing federal immigration laws. They also compared it to state laws that have legalized the use of marijuana despite a continuing federal ban on the drug.


Missouri Republicans have been trying to pass a version of the new gun bill, called the Second Amendment Preservation Act, since at least 2013, when they were stymied by the Democratic governor at the time, Jay Nixon, who vetoed a more severe iteration of the law.

Mr. Taylor said his colleagues were motivated to pursue the effort again this year in response to the election of Mr. Biden and comments on gun restrictions from other Democrats, including Beto O’Rourke, a former Democratic presidential candidate from Texas whose declaration during a 2019 debate — “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15” — raised hackles among gun rights supporters across the country.

“We’ve heard this narrative for the last 10 or 15 years that they want to ban assault weapons and ban high-capacity magazines, and that’s really what this is geared toward, is making sure that we’re protecting from those infringements,” Mr. Taylor said.

Both Mr. Taylor and State Senator Eric Burlison said the Justice Department’s concerns were overblown, and that the bill would have little to no effect on local police officers’ participation in federal task forces. And, they emphasized, the bill does nothing to prohibit F.B.I. agents or other federal officers from arresting people in Missouri for breaking federal law.

“They have every right to come into Missouri as they do today,” Mr. Burlison said of federal agents. He added that the law’s focus was on what he called the “absolutely crazy ideas that we hear from people in the swamp in D.C.,” such as proposals to limit the size of magazines.

But the new laws come at a time of extraordinary volatility and partisan rancor. Gun safety groups warn that their message will only stoke dangerous discord.

“They could not come at a worse time,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, the group founded and funded by the former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. “Cities around the country are struggling with gun violence — it’s going to be a very tough summer. At the same time, we are experiencing fundamental threats to democracy, with the attack on the Capitol and the attempt to overturn the election.”

Despite the backlash, Mr. Biden’s main moves on gun control have been relatively modest, with his most sweeping proposals on expanded background checks and banning assault rifles unlikely to pass Congress anytime soon.

In March the administration announced a slate of executive actions, including a ban on homemade firearms, so-called “ghost guns,” restrictions on the use of arm braces that make it easier to use semiautomatic pistols and a model state legislative proposal for the enactment of “red flag” laws to identify people with mental health issues who might be at greater risk of committing gun crimes.

For supporters of Missouri’s law, these moves are not “common-sense” controls as Mr. Biden claims, but a dangerous intrusion that requires an equally powerful response.

“We will fight any attempts from the federal government to encroach on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens,” Mr. Schmitt said.

(Rach3: I suppose next will be State laws prohibiting local police from enforcing Federal civil rights and voting laws, perhaps even revenue laws and drug laws. )

[maestrob]

(Rach3: I suppose next will be State laws prohibiting local police from enforcing Federal civil rights and voting laws, perhaps even revenue laws and drug laws. )

You took the words right out of my mouth.

My understanding is that Federal law trumps state and local laws (Pardon the expression!) every time, according to the Supreme Court and our Constitution.

In my mind, this is simply an attempt to gin up the base, and would be totally invalidated if Washington decides to challenge these new laws.

Can secession be far behind? It would save us blue state taxpayers tons of money if we no longer had to finance all those pesky Social Security benefit payments, not to mention all the food stamps.

"Keep your government hands off my Medicare!"

Never forget.

[maestrob]

She Was a Black Election Official in Georgia. Then Came New G.O.P. Rules.

In Georgia, Republicans are removing Democrats of color from local boards. In Arkansas, they have stripped election control from county authorities. And they are expanding their election power in many other states.

Lonnie Hollis in LaGrange, Ga. With Republican-led legislatures mounting an expansive takeover of election administration in a raft of new voting bills this year, local officials like Ms. Hollis have been some of the earliest casualties. Credit...Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York Times


By Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein
June 19, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

LaGRANGE, Ga. — Lonnie Hollis has been a member of the Troup County election board in West Georgia since 2013. A Democrat and one of two Black women on the board, she has advocated Sunday voting, helped voters on Election Days and pushed for a new precinct location at a Black church in a nearby town.

But this year, Ms. Hollis will be removed from the board, the result of a local election law signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican. Previously, election board members were selected by both political parties, county commissioners and the three biggest municipalities in Troup County. Now, the G.O.P.-controlled county commission has the sole authority to restructure the board and appoint all the new members.

“I speak out and I know the laws,” Ms. Hollis said in an interview. “The bottom line is they don’t like people that have some type of intelligence and know what they’re doing, because they know they can’t influence them.”

Ms. Hollis is not alone. Across Georgia, members of at least 10 county election boards have been removed, had their position eliminated or are likely to be kicked off through local ordinances or new laws passed by the state legislature. At least five are people of color and most are Democrats — though some are Republicans — and they will most likely all be replaced by Republicans.

Ms. Hollis and local officials like her have been some of the earliest casualties as Republican-led legislatures mount an expansive takeover of election administration in a raft of new voting bills this year.

G.O.P. lawmakers have also stripped secretaries of state of their power, asserted more control over state election boards, made it easier to overturn election results, and pursued several partisan audits and inspections of 2020 results.

Republican state lawmakers have introduced at least 216 bills in 41 states to give legislatures more power over elections officials, according to the States United Democracy Center, a new bipartisan organization that aims to protect democratic norms. Of those, 24 have been enacted into law across 14 states.

G.O.P. lawmakers in Georgia say the new measures are meant to improve the performance of local boards, and reduce the influence of the political parties. But the laws allow Republicans to remove local officials they don’t like, and because several of them have been Black Democrats, voting rights groups fear that these are further attempts to disenfranchise voters of color.

The maneuvers risk eroding some of the core checks that stood as a bulwark against former President Donald J. Trump as he sought to subvert the 2020 election results. Had these bills been in place during the aftermath of the election, Democrats say, they would have significantly added to the turmoil Mr. Trump and his allies wrought by trying to overturn the outcome. They worry that proponents of Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories will soon have much greater control over the levers of the American elections system.

“It’s a thinly veiled attempt to wrest control from officials who oversaw one of the most secure elections in our history and put it in the hands of bad actors,” said Jena Griswold, the chairwoman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State and the current Colorado secretary of state. “The risk is the destruction of democracy.”

Officials like Ms. Hollis are responsible for decisions like selecting drop box and precinct locations, sending out voter notices, establishing early voting hours and certifying elections. But the new laws are targeting high-level state officials as well, in particular secretaries of state — both Republican and Democratic — who stood up to Mr. Trump and his allies last year.

Republicans in Arizona have introduced a bill that would largely strip Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, of her authority over election lawsuits, and then expire when she leaves office. And they have introduced another bill that would give the Legislature more power over setting the guidelines for election administration, a major task currently carried out by the secretary of state.


Had Republican voting bills been in place during the aftermath of the election, Democrats and voting rights groups say, they would have significantly added to the turmoil Mr. Trump and his allies wrought by trying to overturn the results.

Under Georgia’s new voting law, Republicans significantly weakened the secretary of state’s office after Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who is the current secretary, rebuffed Mr. Trump’s demands to “find” votes. They removed the secretary of state as the chair of the state election board and relieved the office of its voting authority on the board.

Kansas Republicans in May overrode a veto from Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, to enact laws stripping the governor of the power to modify election laws and prohibiting the secretary of state, a Republican who repeatedly vouched for the security of voting by mail, from settling election-related lawsuits without the Legislature’s consent.

And more Republicans who cling to Mr. Trump’s election lies are running for secretary of state, putting a critical office within reach of conspiracy theorists. In Georgia, Representative Jody Hice, a Republican who voted against certifying President Biden’s victory, is running against Mr. Raffensperger. Republican candidates with similar views are running for secretary of state in Nevada, Arizona and Michigan.

“In virtually every state, every election administrator is going to feel like they’re under the magnifying glass,” said Victoria Bassetti, a senior adviser to the States United Democracy Center.


More immediately, it is local election officials at the county and municipal level who are being either removed or stripped of their power.

In Arkansas, Republicans were stung last year when Jim Sorvillo, a three-term state representative from Little Rock, lost re-election by 24 votes to Ashley Hudson, a Democrat and local lawyer. Elections officials in Pulaski County, which includes Little Rock, were later found to have accidentally tabulated 327 absentee ballots during the vote-counting process, 27 of which came from the district.

Mr. Sorvillo filed multiple lawsuits aiming to stop Ms. Hudson from being seated, and all were rejected. The Republican caucus considered refusing to seat Ms. Hudson, then ultimately voted to accept her.

But last month, Arkansas Republicans wrote new legislation that allows a state board of election commissioners — composed of six Republicans and one Democrat — to investigate and “institute corrective action” on a wide variety of issues at every stage of the voting process, from registration to the casting and counting of ballots to the certification of elections. The law applies to all counties, but it is widely believed to be aimed at Pulaski, one of the few in the state that favor Democrats.


The author of the legislation, State Representative Mark Lowery, a Republican from a suburb of Little Rock, said it was necessary to remove election power from the local authorities, who in Pulaski County are Democrats, because otherwise Republicans could not get a fair shake.

“Without this legislation, the only entity you could have referred impropriety to is the prosecuting attorney, who is a Democrat, and possibly not had anything done,” Mr. Lowery said in an interview. “This gives another level of investigative authority to a board that is commissioned by the state to oversee elections.”

Asked about last year’s election, Mr. Lowery said, “I do believe Donald Trump was elected president.”

A separate new Arkansas law allows a state board to “take over and conduct elections” in a county if a committee of the legislature determines that there are questions about the “appearance of an equal, free and impartial election.”

In Georgia, the legislature passed a unique law for some counties. For Troup County, State Representative Randy Nix, a Republican, said he had introduced the bill that restructured the county election board — and will remove Ms. Hollis — only after it was requested by county commissioners. He said he was not worried that the commission, a partisan body with four Republicans and one Democrat, could exert influence over elections.

“The commissioners are all elected officials and will face the voters to answer for their actions,” Mr. Nix said in an email.

Eric Mosley, the county manager for Troup County, which Mr. Trump carried by 22 points, said that the decision to ask Mr. Nix for the bill was meant to make the board more bipartisan. It was unanimously supported by the commission.

“We felt that removing both the Republican and Democratic representation and just truly choose members of the community that invest hard to serve those community members was the true intent of the board,” Mr. Mosley said. “Our goal is to create both political and racial diversity on the board.”

In Morgan County, east of Atlanta, Helen Butler has been one of the state’s most prominent Democratic voices on voting rights and election administration. A member of the county board of elections in a rural, Republican county, she also runs the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a group dedicated to protecting the voting rights of Black Americans and increasing their civic engagement.


But Ms. Butler will be removed from the county board at the end of the month, after Mr. Kemp signed a local bill that ended the ability of political parties to appoint members.

“I think it’s all a part of the ploy for the takeover of local boards of elections that the state legislature has put in place,” Ms. Butler said. “It is them saying that they have the right to say whether an election official is doing it right, when in fact they don’t work in the day to day and don’t understand the process themselves.”

It’s not just Democrats who are being removed. In DeKalb County, the state’s fourth-largest, Republicans chose not to renominate Baoky Vu to the election board after more than 12 years in the position. Mr. Vu, a Republican, had joined with Democrats in a letter opposing an election-related bill that eventually failed to pass.

To replace Mr. Vu, Republicans nominated Paul Maner, a well-known local conservative with a history of false statements, including an insinuation that the son of a Georgia congresswoman was killed in “a drug deal gone bad.”

Back in LaGrange, Ms. Hollis is trying to do as much as she can in the time she has left on the board. The extra precinct in nearby Hogansville, where the population is roughly 50 percent Black, is a top priority. While its population is only about 3,000, the town is bifurcated by a rail line, and Ms. Hollis said that sometimes it can take an exceedingly long time for a line of freight cars to clear, which is problematic on Election Days.

“We’ve been working on this for over a year,” Ms. Hollis said, saying Republicans had thrown up procedural hurdles to block the process. But she was undeterred.

“I’m not going to sit there and wait for you to tell me what it is that I that I should do for the voters there,” she said. “I’m going to do the right thing.”

Rachel Shorey contributed research.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/us/p ... e=Homepage

[maestrob]

Court sets Smartmatic dismissal date on Giuliani, Bartiromo, others

A date has been set for oral arguments over the dismissal motions of Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, Maria Bartiromo, Sidney Powell, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro in the $2.7-billion Smartmatic defamation case about 2020 presidential election conspiracy theories.

Judge David B. Cohen of the New York State Supreme Court for the County of New York will hear the arguments on Aug. 17 starting at 9:30 a.m. from attorneys for those seeking to dismiss the case.

One team of lawyers will represent Fox, Bartiromo, Dobbs, and Pirro in their motion to dismiss, which was filed April 26.

Giuliani and Powell, who both filed their dismissal motions on April 8, each have their own representation.

Together, Fox, Bartiromo, Dobbs and Pirro have argued that Smartmatic hasn't proven they were acting maliciously while talking about or reporting on the election. Maliciousness is a standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court in the watershed 1964 case The New York Times v. Sullivan. They also all each filed individual reasons the case against them should be thrown out.

Lack of malice is also one of Giuliani's arguments for dismissal, and Powell has argued, in part, that the court has no jurisdiction over her.

Fox has similarly filed a dismissal motion in the $1.6-billion lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems has brought against it. The suit also concerns claims made during the network's coverage of the 2020 presidential election.

In addition, Dominion has sued Powell and MyPillow company CEO Michael Lindell. Powell has filed a motion to dismiss that case, while Lindell has filed a countersuit.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... np1taskbar

[Rach3]

Missouri Has Declared Federal Gun Laws Invalid.
June 17, 2021 5:19 PM ET

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/17/10076901 ... ws-invalid

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson speaks at a campaign rally at a gun store in October in Lee's Summit, Mo. Parson has signed into law a measure that could fine state and local law enforcement officers $50,000 for helping to enforce federal gun laws.

Missouri has new a law that claims to invalidate all federal gun control laws — and prohibits state and local cooperation with enforcement of those laws.

Gov. Mike Parson signed the bill, known as HB 85 or the Second Amendment Preservation Act, into law Saturday at a gun store and shooting range called Frontier Justice.

The law declares federal laws and regulations "that infringe on the people's right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment ... must be invalid in this state."

Parson, a Republican, said in a press release that the legislation "draws a line in the sand and demonstrates our commitment to reject any attempt by the federal government to circumvent the fundamental right Missourians have to keep and bear arms to protect themselves and their property."

But can a state actually invalidate a federal law?

No.

"They can pass a law that says that there are 46 planets, they can pass a law that says that there are 16 days in the week. It doesn't make it so," says Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and an expert on federal courts and constitutional law. "It has no effect legally because the Constitution specifically says you can't do that."

Article continues after sponsor message

"If I am a resident of Missouri, I am no less subject to federal gun laws today than I was yesterday," Vladeck tells NPR.

The Constitution says federal law is supreme over state law
The U.S. Constitution's Supremacy Clause essentially says federal law is supreme over state law. And the preemption doctrine means that "valid federal law will always displace a state law, even a state constitutional provision that is inconsistent with that federal law," Vladeck says.

He notes that after the Affordable Care Act was enacted, some states passed laws that said the ACA wouldn't apply in those states. But that hasn't stopped the ACA from being the law of the land in every state.

So, what sort of federal gun laws are there? There are limits on what kinds of guns you can sell across state lines, and limits on what kind of guns and accessories can be sold in the first place. There are federal background check requirements. One provision bans the possession of firearms by individuals convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence. And there are laws governing the process and substance of gun sales, Vladeck says.

The new law doesn't change the liability of people in Missouri or exempt them from federal laws. So if you're a Missouri gun shop owner, you're still required to uphold federal background check requirements and other federal laws, even if the governor suggests otherwise.

Vladeck views Missouri's new law as symbolic public relations stunt. But he says it's symbolism that can be harmful: "You run the risk that the state officials are actually sending a message to their constituents that is just incorrect, and that is exposing them to legal liability that they may not otherwise realize."

"A Missouri gun store that thinks all of a sudden it can stop complying with federal law is going to receive a pretty unpleasant visit from federal authorities," Vladeck says.



States can decide not to help federal law enforcement
While states can't invalidate federal law, they can decide the extent to which they assist federal law enforcement.

"Under the 10th Amendment, states do have the right to withhold the use of their resources to enforce federal laws," says Allison Anderman, senior counsel at Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

"We're just simply saying we're not going to lift a finger to enforce their rules," Missouri state Sen. Eric Burlison, a Republican, said of the bill last month, according to The Kansas City (Mo.) Star.

In addition to claiming to invalidate federal gun laws, Missouri's new law prohibits state and local cooperation with enforcement of those laws. Agencies whose officers knowingly enforce federal gun laws could be hit with fines of $50,000 for each violating officer.

State and local officers are not usually tasked with going out and enforcing federal law, Vladeck says – usually it happens in an ancillary fashion: "If they're conducting a search of a home because of probable cause of a state crime, they might also find evidence of a federal crime that they'll refer to federal authorities."

Whether local law enforcement in Missouri will do that when it comes to guns is now in question.

The Department of Justice sent a letter on Wednesday night to Parson and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, warning that the state's law could damage the working relationship between local and federal authorities, The Associated Press reported. Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton asked Parson and Schmitt to clarify the law and how it would work by Friday.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed the accuracy of the AP's report. NPR has not viewed the letter.

NPR asked the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives whether the statute would have an impact on its enforcement in the state, but an ATF spokesperson said the agency does not comment on local or state firearms law.

It could have a chilling effect on law enforcement
Missouri has one of the country's highest rates of gun deaths per capita, and weak gun control laws.

The law could have a chilling effect on law enforcement officers' actions when it comes to guns, even if its provisions are unconstitutional and confusing, Anderman says.

"There is a tremendous amount of ambiguity in this bill as to what would constitute a violation, and that may inhibit law enforcement from taking action that is needed to protect the community," she tells NPR.

Say an officer encounters someone who has a felony conviction and is in possession of a firearm?

"They may not refer that case to federal law enforcement out of fear that they would be liable for a $50,000 fine. And that in turn can result in lack of prosecution of a law that is intended to keep guns out of the hands of people who have committed society's most serious crimes," Anderman says.

The state is not alone in considering this kind of legislation. Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said in April he would sign a similar bill approved by the Legislature there.

Other states are considering legislation to nullify federal gun laws. But Missouri's law, Anderman says, will have real-life consequences — whether or not any law enforcement officers are actually prosecuted and fined.

"How many officers have failed to take some action that they might have otherwise taken because of this law? We will likely never know the answer," she says, "but it's the deterrent effect that is so concerning."


Fww, From Kansas City Star today : " Missouri has the highest rate for new COVID-19 cases of any state in the country.Missouri counties account for 13 of the top 25 counties in the U.S. with the highest rate of new cases.Missouri politicians said COVID fight was socialism — now we’re No. 1 in new cases. Just 38% of Missourians are fully vaccinated, and the delta variant of the coronavirus is here."

[Rach3]

From AxiosAM today:

Following his successful effort to ban critical race theory in public schools, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis expanded his war against student "indoctrination" by signing three new bills yesterday, Axios Tampa Bay reporter Selene San Felice writes. The bills:

Require state colleges and universities to annually survey their students, faculty and staff about their beliefs to ensure "viewpoint diversity and intellectual freedom."

Prevent state colleges and universities from limiting student access to ideas "they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive."

Create a K-12 civics curriculum that contrasts the U.S. with communist and totalitarian governments using "portraits in patriotism."

Why it matters: DeSantis, viewed as a top 2024 presidential candidate and a leader in the GOP culture war, hinted his administration might cut funding to schools that don't comply.

[Rach3]

The United GOP States of America declare war on Mexico and Central America :

https://www.thegazette.com/government-p ... an-border/

[Rach3]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/oan-goes- ... tion-fraud

[Rach3]

Hawley-ville Missouri's GOP monsters want the poor to get pregnant and then deny them abortions.
Those who an afford are also limited.
One way to increase Missouri's " labor" force I guess.Who would otherwise choose to live in Missouri.


From Kansas City Star headline today:

GOVERNMENT & POLITICS
‘Do you believe in birth control at all?’ Missouri Senate moves closer to floor fight
Some senators want to limit Medicaid coverage of contraceptives like Plan B and IUDs when they renew a tax to fund Medicaid.

From Planned Parenthood Missouri:

Last May, just days after Gov. Mike Parson signed one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country into law, the Missouri DHSS refused to renew Planned Parenthood’s license to provide abortion. Planned Parenthood sued, and a state judge blocked DHSS from shutting down Planned Parenthood. In June 2019, the AHC in Missouri granted a stay, allowing Planned Parenthood to remain open while its case challenging the state’s denial of its abortion facility license was being litigated. The AHC heard the case last October and today, the AHC issued its decision, finding that RHS provides safe abortions and that DHSS wrongly withheld RHS’s license and ordered the license renewed.

During the AHC hearing last October, Missouri’s DHSS director, Randall Williams, was thrust into national headlines after he admitted under oath to keeping a spreadsheet of women’s menstrual cycles to track abortion patients. He also enforced medically unnecessary and invasive pelvic exams on abortion patients. All of this happened just after Gov. Parson signed one of the most extreme anti-abortion bills in the country — chock full of various abortion bans targeting all stages of pregnancy, all in one.

There is now only one clinic in Missouri , in St.Louis, providing abortion service.

From Planned Parenthood Missouri:

Abortion is legal in Missouri up to 22 weeks from a woman's last menstrual period. After this point abortion is against the law unless the woman's life or health is threatened.

Is there a mandatory waiting period before I can have an abortion?

YES. Missouri law requires every woman to obtain informed consent about her procedure at least 72 hours before the procedure. ( Rach3: Probably unconstitutional.)

If I'm Medicaid eligible, can I have my abortion paid for?

In Missouri, Medicaid will only pay for abortion in the cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. If you think you qualify for payment under Medicaid, contact your Medicaid provider.

Can health care providers (doctors, hospitals, nurses, clinics) refuse to perform abortions or even refuse to give me information about them?

YES. Missouri law allows individuals and institutions that object to abortion for religious or moral reasons to refuse to perform them. In addition, they do not have to give you information or referrals.

[maestrob]

The United GOP States of America declare war on Mexico and Central America :

https://www.thegazette.com/government-p ... an-border/

Could not access either of the articles you posted today from the Gazette, Rach3!

Oh, well! Same thing happens in China, doesn't it?

[Rach3]

Could not access either of the articles you posted today from the Gazette, Rach3!

Sorry.Here:

DES MOINES — Up to 30 Iowa State Patrol officers will be redeployed for about two weeks to the U.S.-Mexico border to help law enforcement and border security efforts there, Gov. Kim Reynolds and the state Department of Public Safety announced Thursday.

Reynolds said she approved the action in response to requests from Republican Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact between states.

“My first responsibility is to the health and safety of Iowans and the humanitarian crisis at our nation’s southern border is affecting all 50 states,” Reynolds said in a statement “The rise in drugs, human trafficking, and violent crime has become unsustainable. Iowa has no choice but to act, and it’s why I am honoring Texas’ Emergency Management Assistance Compact following assurances from the Iowa Department of Public Safety that it will not compromise our ability to provide all necessary public safety services to Iowans.”

On June 10, Abbott and Ducey formally requested law enforcement support from all 50 states through the interstate mutual aid agreement that enables states to share resources during a disaster, according to Reynolds' office. With the action, Iowa would join Florida, Nebraska, and Idaho — states all led by Republican governors — in sending law enforcement to assist Texas and Arizona.

“It is anticipated that approximately 25 to 30 sworn members of the Department will travel to Texas in support of this request,” said a statement from the Iowa Department of Public Safety. “The deployment is expected to last approximately two weeks.”

Currently, the Iowa State Patrol has 360 sworn staff with 267 solely assigned to road duty, according to the department.

Neither the department not the governor’s office responded to questions after the announcement Thursday of whether the border duties would require any special training or what powers Iowa troopers have outside the state.

“For officer safety purposes, the Iowa State Patrol does not provide specific operational details of missions,” said Debbie McClung, a spokeswoman for the Public Safety Department.

A department email obtained by WHO-TV said that the state “will be soliciting officers to travel to Texas to support this request. We anticipate the travel dates will be July 8-23, 2021.”

Under the interstate pact, the states requesting the aid must reimburse other states that provide it for the cost.

In a news release, Reynolds' office said the Iowa National Guard currently is conducting a mission with 24 soldiers from the Unit 2/34 Infantry Brigade Combat Team to assist law enforcement agencies at the southern border, per an October 2020 request from the federal government.

In May, there were roughly 180,000 border encounters, a 20 year high, according to the governor's office. Also, U.S. Customs and Border Protection in March reported a 233 percent increase in fentanyl seizures from the previous year. In May, that year over year increase climbed to 300 percent. In Iowa, law enforcement officials are recovering drugs, illegal narcotics, and weapons being smuggled across the nation’s southern border by drug cartels, the governor's office added.

Manny Galvez, a North Liberty resident and Catholic Worker House activist, said Reynolds should be welcoming immigrants to Iowa, not sending state police to the border.

“This is crazy. The governor denied welcoming children and now she is sending the police. How shameful and an absolutely irrational waste of state resources,” Galvez said in a statement.

A spokesman for Iowa City Catholic Worker said the organization has helped admit 10 refugee families into the country since Jan. 20, after they were initially expelled back to Mexico under a federal order. The group has 18 cases pending with the American Civil Liberties Union and its members also have helped four families reunite with unaccompanied family members this year.

Reynolds made her deployment announcement on the eve of Vice President Kamala Harris’ planned trip to the U.S.-Mexico border at El Paso, Texas.

The Harris visit follows weeks of criticism that she hasn't visited the area despite being tasked by the Biden administration with trying to alleviate the flow of migration over the southern border. Conservatives have been pushing Harris to visit the border for weeks as they raise alarm over a record number of unaccompanied children who have crossed into the United States this spring.

Former President Donald Trump plans on touring Texas’ southern border next week with Abbott, who recently announced that Texas will take steps to build its own border wall and has touted Operation Lone Star — an initiative to bolster state law enforcement presence at the border.

Reynolds previously criticized Biden administration officials’ lack of transparency in flying 19 refugee children into Des Moines to be transported to sponsor families without notifying her or other Iowa officials. The action occurred, she said, despite her previous rejection of a federal request that immigrant children be housed in Iowa.

Reynolds and other Republicans have asked the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold a public hearing about the movement of migrant children into states after unaccompanied refugee children were flown into Iowa without her office being notified.

[maestrob]

Mountain out of a molehill?

“My first responsibility is to the health and safety of Iowans and the humanitarian crisis at our nation’s southern border is affecting all 50 states,” Reynolds said in a statement “The rise in drugs, human trafficking, and violent crime has become unsustainable. Iowa has no choice but to act, and it’s why I am honoring Texas’ Emergency Management Assistance Compact following assurances from the Iowa Department of Public Safety that it will not compromise our ability to provide all necessary public safety services to Iowans.”

Yet barely 2% of Iowa's population is made up of undocumented immigrants, many of whom are business owners who pay taxes and live peacefully in their communities. I kid you not:

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil. ... ts-in-iowa

50,000 undocumented immigrants comprised 31 percent of the immigrant population and 2 percent of the total state population in 2016.

[Rach3]

From AxiosAM newsletter today:

At least one-third of the nearly 700 Republicans who have filed to run for House or Senate next year have embraced Donald Trump’s false election claims, the WashPost's Amy Gardner reports.

"Across the country, ... Republican candidates for state and federal offices are increasingly focused on the last election."
"Dozens of candidates promoting the baseless notion that the election was rigged are seeking powerful statewide offices — such as governor, attorney general and secretary of state, which would give them authority over the administration of elections."

[Rach3]

CNN today, a Right wing-nut again adverse to spending $$ :

(CNN)Sen. Ron Johnson insisted again last week that he is not a climate change denier, but CNN's KFile found video of him from just weeks earlier telling a Republican group that it is "bullsh*t."

"I don't know about you guys, but I think climate change is -- as Lord Monckton said -- bullsh*t," the Wisconsin Republican said, without uttering the expletive but mouthing it, and referring to British conservative climate change denier Lord Christopher Monckton. "By the way, it is."

Johnson, a member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, continued that "there are more and more scientists" writing books "just laying this to waste" and questioned why the US was focused on the climate crisis at all.

"What are we doing here? Well, we're killing ourselves," said Johnson, adding, "it's a self-inflicted wound."

Johnson made the comments in early June to the Republican Women of Greater Wisconsin Luncheon at Alioto's in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.

His recent comments come as North America endures a historic and dangerous heat wave expected to last until mid-July that scientists linked to the climate crisis. The scorching temperatures are to blame for dozens of deaths and hundreds of visits to the emergency room in the Pacific Northwest.

Johnson, who has yet to announce he is running for reelection, has a long history of downplaying the climate crisis, but he has repeatedly refuted accusations that he is a climate change denier.

In a statement, Johnson told CNN, "My statements are consistent. I am not a climate change denier, but I also am not a climate change alarmist. Climate is not static. It has always changed and always will change." The senator offered a similar statement to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week, and later posted a response with his opinion on climate change on his Senate website, in which he said humanity could "easily adapt" to climate change.

Johnson's views are at odds with scientific consensus that climate change is real and caused by human activities.

In 2016, Johnson said, "Mankind has actually flourished in warmer temperatures." He added, "I just think the question always is what is the cost versus the benefit of anything we do to try and clean up our environment."

And in 2010, when he was a Senate candidate, he claimed that sunspots were behind climate change as opposed to man-made activity and that excessive amounts of carbon dioxide "helps the trees grow."

"I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change," he said at the time.

Also in 2010, Johnson falsely suggested that the country Greenland was "actually green at one point in time," to dismiss the effects of climate change.

And only a few months ago, in March 2021, the senator reiterated that belief in an interview with The New York Times. "I could be wrong there, but that's always been my assumption that, at some point in time, those early explorers saw green," Johnson said. "I have no idea." The true origin of the country's name comes from Erik the Red, a Norse explorer who sought to attract settlers to the country.

In early June at the Republican luncheon, Johnson said that the media and Democrats used the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change to create a "state of fear" and "control." He also criticized committees in Washington seeking to address climate change.
"It was all about creating the state of fear as they tried to do with global warming. Oh, I'm sorry. It's climate change now. Yeah. Whatever works," mocked Johnson. "Whatever works that they can, you can set up a state of fear so they can step in and alleviate their fear."
"Of course, you know, the way they are is alleviated and it's amazing in Washington, you see these committees, all these problems we're always dealing with. Right. All these issues. I don't, I don't recall an issue where the first solution isn't always more money," said Johnson. "More money. More money. More money and, of course, you follow the money and the money produces control."

Notably, a small group of House Republicans recently created the Conservative Climate Caucus, which seeks to educate Republicans on climate change policies and legislation as an alternative to well-known progressive policies like the Green New Deal.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/06/politics ... index.html

[maestrob]

Ron Johnson again, the head of the Republican intellectuals' Caucus.

[maestrob]

In Michigan, Pro-Impeachment Republicans Face Voters’ Wrath

Representative Peter Meijer, a Republican who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump, seeks “decency and humility” in Western Michigan, but has found anger, fear and misinformation.


By Jonathan Weisman
July 8, 2021
Updated 11:07 a.m. ET

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Representative Peter Meijer cites Gerald R. Ford as his inspiration these days, not because the former president held his House seat for 24 years or because his name is all over this city — from its airport to its freeway to its arena — but because in Mr. Ford, the freshman congressman sees virtues lost to his political party.

Ford took control after a president resigned rather than be impeached for abusing his power in an attempt to manipulate the outcome of an election.

“It was a period of turmoil,” said Mr. Meijer, who was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald J. Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Ford’s greatest asset, he added, was “offering — this word is becoming too loaded of late — a sense of morals, moral leadership, a sense of value and centering decency and humility.”

“Sometimes when you’re surrounded by cacophony, it helps to have someone sitting there who isn’t adding another screaming voice onto the pile,” Mr. Meijer added.

Six months after the Capitol attack and 53 miles southeast of Grand Rapids, on John Parish’s farm in the hamlet of Vermontville, Mr. Meijer’s problems sat on folding chairs on the Fourth of July. They ate hot dogs, listened to bellicose speakers and espoused their own beliefs that reflected how, even at age 33, Mr. Meijer may represent the Republican Party’s past more than its future.

The stars of the “Festival of Truth” on Sunday were adding their screaming voices onto the pile, and the 100 or so West Michiganders in the audience were enthusiastically soaking it up. Many of them inhabited an alternative reality in which Mr. Trump was re-elected, their votes were stolen, the deadly Jan. 6 mob was peaceful, coronavirus vaccines were dangerous and conservatives were oppressed.

“God is forgiving, and — I don’t know — we’re forgiving people,” Geri Nichols, 79, of nearby Hastings, said as she spoke of her disappointment in Mr. Meijer. “But he did wrong. He didn’t support our president like he should have.”

Under an unseasonably warm sun, her boyfriend, Gary Munson, 80, shook his head, agreeing: “He doesn’t appear to be what he says he is.”

For all its political eccentricities, Michigan is not unique. Dozens of congressional candidates planning challenges next year are promoting the false claims of election fraud pressed by Mr. Trump. But Western Michigan does have one distinction: It is home to 20 percent of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump — that is, two of 10.

The other one, Representative Fred Upton, 68, took office in an adjacent district west and south of here the year before Mr. Meijer was born, 1987. But the two find themselves in similar political straits. Both will face multiple primary challengers next year who accuse them of disloyalty — or worse, treason — for holding Mr. Trump responsible for the riot that raged as they met to formalize the election results for the victor, President Biden.

Both men followed their impeachment votes with votes to create a bipartisan commission to examine the Capitol riot, two of 35 House Republicans to do so. Both face a backlash from Republican voters who are enraged by what they allege are an effort by the F.B.I. to hunt down peaceful protesters, a news media silencing conservative voices, a governor who has taken away their livelihoods with overzealous pandemic restrictions and a Democratic secretary of state who has stolen their votes.

Many of their grievances have less to do with Mr. Trump himself than the false claims that he promoted, which have taken root with voters who now look past him.

“People think people who support Trump are like ‘Trump is our God,’” said Audra Johnson, one of Mr. Meijer’s Republican challengers, explaining why she refuses to get inoculated against the coronavirus with a vaccine the Trump administration helped create. “No, he’s not.”

“People are terrified,” Ms. Johnson added over grilled cheese and tomato soup at Crow’s Nest Restaurant in Kalamazoo. She added, “We’re heading toward a civil war, if we’re not already in a cold civil war.”


In June, a Republican-led State Senate inquiry into Michigan’s 2020 vote count affirmed Mr. Biden’s Michigan victory by more than 154,000 votes, nearly 3 percentage points, and found “no evidence” of “either significant acts of fraud” or “an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity.”

“The committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain,” it concluded.

The Meijer name graces grocery stores that are a regional staple — founded in 1934 by the congressman’s great-grandfather, Hendrik Meijer, a Dutch immigrant — and a popular botanical garden and sculpture park, established by his grandfather, Frederik, that is one of Grand Rapids’ biggest attractions. His father, Hank, and his uncle, Doug, took over the Meijer chain in 1990 as Forbes-listed billionaires.

Peter Meijer’s pedigree is matched by his résumé: a year at West Point, a degree from Columbia University, eight years in the Army Reserve, including a deployment to Iraq as an intelligence adviser, and an M.B.A. from New York University.

But these days in some circles, “Meijer” is less synonymous with groceries, gardens and prestige than with the impeachment of Mr. Trump.

“Last time, the problem was we were running against Peter Meijer,” said Tom Norton, who lost to Mr. Meijer in the 2020 primary and is challenging him again in 2022. “The advantage this time is we’re running against Peter Meijer. It’s a complete flip.”

In his Capitol Hill office, Mr. Meijer said that in one-on-one discussions with some of his constituents, he could make headway explaining his votes and how dangerous the lies of a stolen presidential election had become for the future of American democracy.

“The challenge is if you believe that Nov. 3 was a landslide victory for Donald Trump that was stolen, and Jan. 6 was the day to stop that steal,” he said. “I can’t come to an understanding with somebody when we’re dealing with completely separate sets of facts and realities.”

At a recent event, he said, a woman informed Mr. Meijer that he would shortly be arrested for treason and hauled before a military tribunal, presumably to be shot.

“People are willing to kill and die over these alternative realities,” he said.

Yet at least one of his primary challengers is amplifying that alternative reality. Ms. Johnson, a pro-Trump activist, splashed onto the scene in 2019 as the “MAGA bride,” when she appeared at her wedding reception over the July 4 weekend in a Make America Great Again dress.

She helped organize armed protests of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s pandemic restrictions at the State Capitol in Lansing and traveled with a convoy of buses to Washington for Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 protest against election certification.

While she said she did not enter the Capitol that day, she said she knew people who knew people who did — peacefully, she insists.

“Honestly, they’re terrified that the F.B.I. is going to come knock on their door,” Ms. Johnson said.

Mr. Norton, who jousted with Mr. Meijer at the Northview Fourth of July parade in a middle-class Grand Rapids neighborhood, said afterward that he was sure there was election fraud in 2020 and was pushing for an Arizona-style “forensic audit” that would go even deeper than the audit already conducted.

One of Mr. Upton’s challengers, state Representative Steve Carra, has introduced legislation to force such an audit in Michigan, even though he conceded that he had only skimmed the June report, which not only concluded that there was no fraud but called for those making such false claims to be referred for prosecution.

“To say that there’s no evidence of widespread fraud I think is wrong,” said Mr. Carra, who was elected to his first term in November, at age 32.

He sees a golden opportunity to finally unseat Mr. Upton, who has been in Congress since before Mr. Carra was born. Redistricting could bring a new cache of voters from neighboring Battle Creek who have not spent decades pulling the lever for the incumbent. Mr. Upton’s challengers are bringing his moderate voting record to primary voters’ attention.

But above all, there is Mr. Upton’s impeachment vote.

“When Fred Upton voted to impeach President Trump, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me,” Mr. Carra said, sitting on a park bench in Three Rivers, Mich.

Jon Rocha, another of Mr. Upton’s challengers, spoke in measured tones to a reporter about his rival’s vote to impeach. Mr. Upton had been acting out of emotion, said the former Marine, who is Mexican American and a political newcomer, and had failed to consider Mr. Trump’s due process or take the time to investigate.

But onstage in front of the crowd at the Festival of Truth, Mr. Rocha’s tone darkened.

“This country is under attack,” he thundered. “Our children are being indoctrinated to hate the color of their skin, to hate this country and to believe this country is systemically racist and meant to oppress anybody with a different skin pigment. I can attest to you, as an American Mexican, that is not the case.”


Oppression is a theme: Ms. Johnson said she understood — though, she hastened to add, did not condone — violence by beleaguered conservatives. Mr. Norton suggested that transgender women were driven by mental illness to lop off body parts, and yet it was only those who objected who were ridiculed. Larry Eberly, the organizer of the Festival of Truth, warned the crowd that “we’re being manipulated” into accepting coronavirus vaccines, bellowing to cheers, “I will die first before they shove that needle into my arm.”

In the end, none of this may matter to the composition of Congress. The anti-incumbent vote may be badly split, allowing Representatives Meijer and Upton to survive their primaries and sail to re-election.

Mr. Meijer’s district had been held for a decade by Justin Amash, a libertarian-leaning iconoclast who was fiercely critical of Mr. Trump and was the first House Republican to call for his impeachment. Amid the backlash, Mr. Amash left the Republican Party in 2019 to try to run as a libertarian. Then, when Mr. Amash found no quarter, he retired.

But Mr. Meijer will have his name, the support of the Republican apparatus and a formidable money advantage.

The question vexing him is not so much his own future, but his party’s. That is where he looks wistfully to Ford.

“Was he necessarily the leader on moving the Republican Party in a direction? I can’t speak to what his internal conversations were,” Mr. Meijer said. “But in terms of giving confidence to the country that Republican leadership could be ethical and honest and sincere, I think he hit it out of the park.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/us/p ... e=Homepage

[Rach3]

By Michael Cohn, NYT today :

The Internal Revenue Service agreed to grant tax-exempt status to Christians Engaged, a nonprofit that urges Christians to pray for elected officials and vote, after coming under pressure from conservatives.The group’s legal advocate, First Liberty Institute, said Wednesday that the reversal comes after a national backlash against the IRS’s initial rejection of Christians Engaged’s nonprofit status because, the IRS claimed, “ible teachings are typically affiliated with the [Republican] party and candidates.”

Several prominent Republican lawmakers in Congress had criticized the IRS decision in recent days.The IRS reversal comes as the agency is facing a decision over its budget at a time when the IRS has been stretched over the past year to deal with new tax laws, the distribution of multiple rounds of Economic Impact Payments and soon a monthly Child Tax Credit that it will need to start disbursing next week. Several Republicans in Congress have already signaled their opposition to plans by the Biden administration to increase the IRS’s enforcement budget to bring in more money to pay for the administration’s proposed budget and its American Families Plan and American Jobs Plan. In 2013, the IRS faced criticism from Republicans who accused the agency of targeting Tea Party and conservative groups that were seeking tax-exempt status for extra scrutiny, and the scandal led to the ouster of the director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations unit and the acting commissioner, along with other top officials.

The IRS decision to approve tax-exempt status was welcomed by the group. “I am incredibly thankful to the IRS for doing the right thing, and we look forward to continuing our mission of educating more followers of Jesus to pray for our nation and to be civically engaged,” said Christians Engaged President Bunni Pounds in a statement. “When we stand up, our republic works for all Americans.”

Christians Engaged incorporated in July 2019 as a Texas nonprofit corporation “formed exclusively for charitable, religious, educational, or scientific purposes.” From a religious perspective, the group said it offers nonpartisan religious and civic education, focusing on encouraging and educating Christians to be civically engaged as a part of their religious practice. Christians Engaged applied for tax exempt status in late 2019. On May 18, IRS Exempt Organizations Director Stephen A. Martin denied the application, saying that Christians Engaged “engage[s] in prohibited political campaign intervention” and “operate[s] for a substantial non-exempt private purpose and for the private interests of the [Republican] party.” After the appeal, Martin granted the application for 501(c)(3) status.“This is truly great news for our client, as well as religious organizations and churches across America,” said Lea Patterson, counsel for First Liberty Institute, in a statement. “We are grateful the IRS changed course to bring its decision into line with the Constitution and its own regulations.”

Last week, several Republican lawmakers urged the IRS to change course. House Ways and Means Republican leader Kevin Brady, R-Texas, and Oversight Subcommittee Republican leader Mike Kelly, R-Pennsylvania, sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig asking him to address their concerns. “The IRS denial letter singles out Christians Engaged, the organization applying for tax exempt status, because the agency views bible teachings to be Republican-affiliated,’” they wrote. “There are major concerns with this approach. First, it is widely known that Democrats also have strongly held religious beliefs. Even this week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki described President Biden as ‘a strong man of faith’ and described his beliefs as something not to be viewed ‘through a political prism.’ Given the strongly held beliefs in biblical teachings by politicians on both sides of the aisle, it is unfounded to conclude that biblical teachings are affiliated with any particular political party.”

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, hailed the IRS’s decision to reverse its position, referring to the Tea Party targeting scandal. “Sadly following in the footsteps of the Obama IRS, the Biden IRS was likewise politically weaponized when it indefensibly denied tax-exempt status to the Texas nonprofit organization Christians Engaged,” Cruz said in a statement Wednesday. “I was proud to stand with 14 of my colleagues in calling out this brazen politicization and demanding the reversal of this open discrimination against Christians. Thankfully, under public scrutiny, the Biden administration was forced to change course; today's reversal is a victory for our religious freedoms and for Americans of faith across our country….”

Let’s see, Texan GOP Ted Cruz happy, Texan GOP Brady happy, GOP Kelly one of the PA legislators who sued to overturn the PA 2020 vote win for Biden, the corporation incorporated in, office in, Texas. Pretty good evidence IRS initial denial correct.

From "Christians" Engaged blog :“ The night before the last Presidential election – our ministry held a prayer call with ministry and political leaders across the state of Texas. One of the Members of Congress on that call made a statement that a week later hit me as extremely profound, he said “One of the worst things that could happen is that the election goes exactly like you want it to go and then you put your trust in elections rather than God.” This is from someone who had a lot to lose if his candidate did not win. His point – which is a good reminder to all of us - Jesus is ultimately our King! Our trust MUST be in Him regardless of what administration is in the White House or if our candidate won or lost.When we have disappointments in any of these systems – we must remember Jesus is our hope. “ ( Wink, wink,Jesus will see to it Trump is President again.)

About the First Liberty Institute : https://firstliberty.org
Recent guest speakers Ken Starr and Mike Pompeo.

[Rach3]

CR Gazette today:

Iowa’s largest utilities have dramatically scaled back efforts to help customers conserve energy since a 2018 law gutted the state’s efficiency requirements.MidAmerican Energy reported kilowatt-hour savings for 2020 that were 64 percent lower than what the utility achieved the year before the law took effect. Alliant Energy’s savings were down 40 percent during the same period.

“That’s just staggering,” said state Sen. Rob Hogg, a Cedar Rapids Democrat who voted against the legislation. “At the very moment when our country needs to be increasing energy efficiency quickly, this is terrible.”

Most states require utilities to make regular investments in energy efficiency programs such as lighting and appliance rebates, which can help keep costs down for customers by delaying the need for more expensive system upgrades.

In 2018, Iowa lawmakers passed a bill that critics at the time warned would “eviscerate” those programs in the state by capping how much utilities could spend on them, exempting several large customers from paying into the programs and subjecting spending to a tougher cost-effectiveness test.

Senate File 2311 was passed in the final days of the 2018 legislative session. All 32 Republican senators and all but five of the 59 Republican House members supported the bill over objections from Democrats and environmental advocates.

The outcome so far has fulfilled predictions made during legislative debate, said Josh Mandelbaum, a senior attorney for the Environmental Law & Policy Center.

“We thought there was going to be a significant reduction in energy savings, and we’re seeing a significant reduction in energy savings,” Mandelbaum said.

Alliant spokesperson Morgan Hawk said the company has continued to meet its energy savings goals — targets that were significantly lowered in the wake of the 2018 law.

“We are proud to have achieved 94 percent of expected electric energy savings in 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic and an unprecedented derecho storm which caused widespread damage across our service area,” Hawk said.

MidAmerican spokesperson Tina Hoffman said the company’s programs “meet budget and savings expectations as set forth in state law.”

“Importantly, because of the changes instituted by the legislature in 2019, customers were able to benefit twofold — first, from immediate savings on their monthly energy bills through the reduced energy efficiency charges, and secondly, from the robust energy efficiency programs that are available to customers to utilize.”

Alliant and MidAmerican filed revised five-year energy efficiency plans after the law took effect. The new and diminished efficiency programs took effect April 1, 2019.

According to an analysis by the Iowa Environmental Council, both utilities cut spending on electricity conservation programs by more than a third, and gas conservation programs by more than three-quarters.

“This means massive savings for customers left on the table and higher energy bills,” said Kerri Johannsen, energy program director for the Iowa Environmental Council.

The law also allowed utilities to eliminate free in-person energy assessments. MidAmerican now leaves its customers to make assessments on their own using an online tool the company provides.

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s yearly state energy efficiency score card dropped Iowa a dozen places since the law’s passage, from 24th nationally in 2018 to 36th place last year.

Hogg acknowledged that utilities faced other hurdles last year, such as the pandemic and a freak windstorm that caused widespread damage across the state. Still, he doesn’t see them as major factors for the decline in energy conservation.

“I don’t think there’s any question that the primary problem here was a change in the law,” Hogg said.

In particular, the spending caps are “the clearest rationale for why this happened,” said Nick Dreher, policy director for the Midwest Energy Efficiency Alliance. The bill prohibited state regulators from requiring utilities to spend more than 2 percent of expected electric revenue or 1.5 percent of expected natural gas revenue on efficiency programs.

“There are measures that are more expensive to run but produce greater savings,” Dreher said. “You’re left with measures that are less expensive but don’t produce the deeper energy savings.”

Calling energy efficiency “the quickest, cheapest and cleanest way to deal with greenhouse gases,” Hogg said he believes his colleagues in the Legislature need to reevaluate the changes they made in 2018.

“Either Iowa needs to fix the law and allow the Iowa Utilities Board to use more energy efficiency,” he said, “or we need national utility legislation. A national clean energy standard would override what Iowa did.”

[maestrob]

I'm all for a national energy standard. Try getting that past Moscow Mitch!

As for the other nonsense.....

Separation of church & state? Really? Such an outdated Constitutional notion.

[maestrob]

The Nation Needs a Reality-Based G.O.P. Only the Kook Caucus Is Stepping Up.

July 8, 2021
By Michelle Cottle

Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.

Brace yourself, America. Next year’s midterms have the potential to stock the Republican Party at all levels with rabble-rousers that make the Gingrich revolutionaries of 1994 and the Tea Partiers of 2010 look like RINO squishes.

Call it the Kook Caucus.

Elections tend to reflect the political zeitgeist. Some coalesce around a hot policy topic: health care, immigration, jobs, crime. Others are fueled by bigger, broader themes: reforming democracy, reining in Big Government, healing partisan divisions, reviving the American dream.

But under Donald Trump, the Republican Party set aside policy and principles to become a cult of personality. The driving concern of today’s candidates, with precious few exceptions, is to stay in the good graces of their exiled but still dangerous and vindictive leader. This requires embracing the fiction that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump and that MAGA loyalists are duty-bound to fight to right this wrong.

That lie has spread like a rash across the Republican base, with a big boost from the conservative media. Half to two-thirds of the party’s voters believe that Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate. Over half believe that election audits will “probably” or “definitely” reverse the outcome, according to a Morning Consult poll from mid-June. (Spoiler alert: They won’t.) And a poll from early June found that 29 percent of Republicans consider it at least somewhat likely that Mr. Trump will be reinstated as president this year. (Not. Gonna. Happen.)

Republican leaders are expected, at minimum, to play along with this toxic rubbish. Those who don’t are courting electoral grief. Big Lie promoters are leaping into races at all levels — from state legislator to governor, state attorney general to the U.S. Senate — and making the 2020 fraud myth Topic A.

“Of the nearly 700 Republicans who have filed initial paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run next year for either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives, at least a third have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat,” according to The Washington Post. This includes 136 incumbents who voted against certifying the election results on Jan. 6.

Incumbents, insurgents, swing districts, safe districts — there is no escape. “Election integrity” has become the magic catchphrase for Republicans looking to juice the MAGA faithful.

It’s not just those who have clashed one-on-one with Mr. Trump being targeted, such as Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming or Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state. (Though it bears noting that at least a half-dozen challengers are aiming to unseat Ms. Cheney for what they see as her betrayal of Mr. Trump.) Senator James Lankford, a solid Oklahoma conservative and Baptist minister, is being challenged by Jackson Lahmeyer, a Tulsa pastor outraged that, following the sacking of the Capitol, Mr. Lankford opted not to oppose the 2020 outcome.

“I saw fear all over him on Jan. 6.,” Mr. Lahmeyer charged at the March event announcing his candidacy, at which he was joined by Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s disgraced national security adviser. “He caved in like an absolute coward, and that let me know he is not the man to represent our state in the fight our country is in right now.”

More humiliating: Mr. Lahmeyer is being personally supported by the head of the Oklahoma Republican Party, John Bennett, who also regards Mr. Lankford as weak on 2020. A state party chairman working against one of his own incumbents, Mr. Lankford has noted, is an uncommon — and unsettling — development.

The early tremors of this election trend are already being felt. Last month, a longtime Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates was unseated in his primary by a political newbie who had worked on the failed Trump legal effort to overturn the election results in Wisconsin. The challenger, Wren Williams, slammed the incumbent for failing to fight the good fight.

“He wasn’t doing anything — squat, diddly,” Mr. Williams told The Washington Post. “He wasn’t taking election integrity seriously. I’m sitting here fighting for election integrity in the courts, and he’s my elected representative who can legislate and he’s not.”

Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist and MAGA guru, has declared 2020 denialism a “litmus test” for Republican office seekers. “There will not be a Republican that wins a primary for 2022 — not one — that doesn’t take the pledge to get to the bottom of Nov. 3,” he predicted to NBC in May.

Certainly, not all the Kook Caucus aspirants will triumph — especially in purplish districts where their baseless fraud talk may not play so well in the generals. But every advance they make is a loss, not only for their constituents but for the nation.

Ominously, this election cycle is not about moving the Republican Party in a more conservative or more moderate direction or about reshaping its policy views. It is about packing the party with conspiracy theorists and liars and people itching to advance Mr. Trump’s belligerent, apocalyptic, reality-resistant brand of politics. Some three dozen QAnon-friendly Republican congressional candidates are in the mix, according to Media Matters’s latest count.

Already, there are far too many Republican officials willing, either cynically or genuinely, to advance Mr. Trump’s Big Lie. An election that installs more of them up and down the ticket could easily turn the acute reality crisis of the past few months into a lingering condition.

A healthy democracy requires a functional, stable, sane opposition party. Right now, the Republican bandwagon appears to be speeding in precisely the opposite direction.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/opin ... e=Homepage

[maestrob]

Citizens, Not the State, Will Enforce New Abortion Law in Texas

The measure bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy. And it effectively deputizes ordinary citizens to sue people involved in the process.


By Sabrina Tavernise
July 9, 2021
Updated 10:30 a.m. ET

People across the country may soon be able to sue abortion clinics, doctors and anyone helping a woman get an abortion in Texas, under a new state law that contains a legal innovation with broad implications for the American court system.

The provision passed the Texas State Legislature this spring as part of a bill that bans abortion after a doctor detects a fetal heartbeat, usually at about six weeks of pregnancy. Many states have passed such bans, but the law in Texas is different.

Ordinarily, enforcement would be up to government officials, and if clinics wanted to challenge the law’s constitutionality, they would sue those officials in making their case. But the law in Texas prohibits officials from enforcing it. Instead, it takes the opposite approach, effectively deputizing ordinary citizens — including from outside Texas — to sue clinics and others who violate the law. It awards them at least $10,000 per illegal abortion if they are successful.

“It’s completely inverting the legal system,” said Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “It says the state is not going to be the one to enforce this law. Your neighbors are.”

The result is a law that is extremely difficult to challenge before it takes effect on Sept. 1, because it is hard to know whom to sue to block it, and lawyers for clinics are now wrestling with what to do about it. Six-week bans in other states have all been blocked as they make their way through the court system.

Texas’ Legislature began a special session on Thursday, with a conservative agenda taking aim at voting rights and other issues.


The law comes as the right to an abortion and the laws governing it are in flux. Abortion opponents have scored major victories in state legislatures over the past decade, with restrictions whittling down access through much of the Midwest and South. The 2021 legislative season has set the record for the most abortion restrictions signed in a single year in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion statistics and supports abortion rights.

The Supreme Court has shifted too, with conservatives now making up a solid majority, and an abortion case before the court next term.

Critics say the Texas law amounts to a kind of hack of the legal system. In an open letter this spring, more than 370 Texas lawyers, including Professor Vladeck, said a central flaw was its attempt to confer legal standing on abortion opponents who were not themselves injured. They called the law an “unprecedented abuse of civil litigation,” and said it could “have a destabilizing impact on the state’s legal infrastructure.”

“If the barista at Starbucks overhears you talking about your abortion, and it was performed after six weeks, that barista is authorized to sue the clinic where you obtained the abortion and to sue any other person who helped you, like the Uber driver who took you there,” said Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University.

Some statutes do authorize private citizens to sue to enforce a law even if they themselves are not harmed, for example California’s consumer protection law, which gives anyone in the state the right to sue a company for disseminating false information or engaging in other unfair business practices, said Howard M. Wasserman, a law professor at Florida International University in Miami. What’s different about Texas’ law, he said, is that private enforcement is not in support of state enforcement; it’s in lieu of it, a switch he said was not good for democracy.

What is more, a Supreme Court ruling last month involving a credit reporting company rejected the concept of people suing when they were not concretely harmed. That case involved lawsuits in federal court, but Professor Wasserman said lawyers for the clinics would probably use it in their arguments in Texas.

The most common place for clinics to challenge abortion restrictions in Texas has been federal court, where they have won more often than at the state level. Supporters of the new law say it is an attempt to argue abortion cases in the courts of the state where they originated — Texas — without anti-abortion measures immediately being suspended by a federal judge, as often happens.

John Seago, legislative director for Texas Right to Life, the largest anti-abortion organization in the state, said that some people in the anti-abortion movement thought “this was not working in federal court, so let’s try a different route.”

Lawyers for the clinics argue that a six-week abortion ban is clearly unconstitutional, and the Texas law is designed to insulate the state from a challenge. Federal protection currently extends to pregnancies up to the point at which a fetus can sustain life outside the womb, about 23 or 24 weeks, and six weeks is often before a woman even knows she is pregnant. Given that federal courts are experienced at deciding constitutional rights issues, lawyers for clinics say, it is logical to go there for relief. The new law, if it takes effect, will make that much harder.

The clinics and their staff “are stuck in state court in a defensive posture, and there’s a lot at stake,” Professor Wasserman said. “If they lose, they are on the hook for significant sums of money.”


The Texas law has energized abortion opponents. Mark Lee Dickson, director of Right to Life of East Texas, said he knows many people who want to sue abortion providers, if and when it takes effect.


Last year, he pushed for an ordinance in Lubbock, whose legal structure was similar. He said that more than 200 churches were part of that effort. Mr. Dickson travels to cities to help them pass such ordinances, and noted that there are almost 30 in the state that have done so. Lubbock was the only one with an abortion clinic, but the sentiment among people in those places could power a broader effort to enforce the state law too, he said.

He said people wanted to sue as an expression of their deeply held belief that abortion is wrong. They saw the procedure as “murder of innocent children and they wanted to do everything they could to stop that,” he said.

Lawyers for abortion clinics are deciding how to respond. Julie Murray, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said that if the law takes effect, clinics and doctors could defend themselves against the citizens who sue and may prevail in individual cases. But what one judge does in one case is not binding on other cases, and she said there could be a flood of suits across Texas’s 254 counties.

Mr. Seago said he did not think there would be a flood of suits. State judges will still expect claimants to build a case, and identifying targets — a specific abortion that was performed later than the fetal heartbeat was detected — would not be easy, he said.

“There’s still quite a lot of hoops to jump through for a claimant to prevail,” he said.

But even the threat of suits can cause a clinic to shut down abortion services. That is what happened in Lubbock. Planned Parenthood, which has a clinic there, sued the city, after the ordinance passed in a voter initiative in May. But the judge threw out the case saying the organization did not have standing to sue the city. The law went into effect June 1, and the clinic has stopped providing abortions. Last week, Planned Parenthood filed a motion to reconsider.

Angela Martinez, manager of the Planned Parenthood health center in Lubbock, said she had to tell patients they would now have to drive five hours each way to Dallas for care.

“It’s a difficult conversation,” she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/a ... e=Homepage

[Rach3]

More GOP who should reinvestigated for possible violation of public health laws:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/gop-rep-madi ... 24762.html

GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn said offering vaccines door-to-door could lead to the government confiscating guns and bibles
Kelsey Vlamis
Sat, July 10, 2021, 12:06 AM

The GOP lawmaker was speaking at a CPAC event in Dallas on Friday.

Joe Biden said Tuesday door-to-door vaccines could improve vaccination rates as the Delta variant spreads.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn said President Joe Biden's call to offer COVID-19 vaccines door-to-door could lead to the government taking people's guns and bibles.

Cawthorn, a Republican from North Carolina, was speaking Friday during an interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference event in Dallas, Texas, taking place this weekend. He was speaking with Right Side Broadcasting Network, a conservative media outlet.

"And now they're sort of talking about going door-to-door to be able to take vaccines to the people. The thing about the mechanisms they would have to build to be able to actually execute that massive of a thing," Cawthorn said, in reference to Biden's latest community-based vaccine push.

"Think about what those mechanisms could be used for. They could then go door-to-door to take your guns. They could go door-to-door to take your bibles," Cawthorn said.


Biden said Tuesday that offering vaccines door-to-door could help increase vaccination rates as the Delta variant of the coronavirus spreads rapidly in several US states. The US also missed the White House's goal of inoculating 70% of adults by July 4th. As of Friday, nearly 59% of adults were fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.

Biden's remarks on Tuesday drew immediate pushback from some conservatives, including Rep. Lauren Boebert, who called the door-to-door vaccinators "needle Nazis." GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also made a Nazi reference, calling the vaccinators "medical brown shirts," a reference to Adolf Hitler's militia and paramilitary force.

The White House hit back at the criticism, with Press Secretary Jen Psaki saying on Friday: "The failure to provide accurate public health information, including the efficacy of vaccines and the accessibility of them to people across the country, including South Carolina, is literally killing people, so maybe they should consider that."

[Rach3]

By Jonathan Edwards, WAPO
July 15, 2021

Sales of T-shirts advocating violence against LGBTQ people at a bar in Wyoming — a state where the brutal murder of a gay college student more than two decades ago inspired hate-crime laws across the country — stopped this month. But only because the shirts sold out.

Sara Burlingame, executive of Wyoming Equality, went to the bar on July 5 in response to a call about the shirts. She confirmed eight were for sale and asked the owner to stop selling them because they were advocating violence against gay people like herself.

The shirt is black with a white design — a bearded man in a biker jacket who’s pointing a handgun at the viewer.
“In Wyoming, we have a cure for AIDS,” the T-shirt says above the man.
Below: “We shoot [homophobic slur]."

The owner told her he’d been selling the shirts out of the bar since right after the murder of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old college student who was beaten, pistol-whipped in the head about 20 times, tied to a fence and left to die in 1998. Shepard’s killing made international news, inspiring state and federal lawmakers to pass hate-crime bills.

The owner agreed he wouldn’t order any more of them, Burlingame said, and she left. But she returned the next day after someone posted an image of the shirt on Facebook. The situation was getting attention online, Burlingame recalled saying, and they needed to pull the shirts.

Her plea was unsuccessful though, she said, as the hubbub made the shirts popular.

So, on Saturday, Wyoming Equality published a post on Facebook: They were not able to convince the bar, which the group didn’t name, but has been identified as the Eagle’s Nest in Cheyenne, to stop selling the shirts. “We hoped that they would choose to stop selling them when they realized the harm it did to the LGBTQ community and those living with AIDS.”

Two days later, the owner told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle he’d sold out of the shirts and wasn’t going to reorder them, adding he was “in the bar business, not the apparel business.”

The Washington Post sent an email to the address listed in state government documents for Eagle’s Nest Inc. and left a voice mail at the bar’s official phone number. No one responded.

Wyoming is one of three states that haven’t passed hate-crime legislation since Shepard was killed, the Associated Press reports.

A year after his death, lawmakers considered legislation that would have extended hate-crime protections to cover sexual orientation, according to a Wyoming State Historical Society entry. The bill failed on a 30-30 tie two days in a row and hasn’t been seriously considered since.

In March, the Wyoming House Judiciary Committee considered a hate-crime bill that would have allowed prosecutors, when seeking punishment, to consider whether someone committed a crime because they were motivated by biases against a victim’s sexual orientation, race, gender, or other characteristics, the AP reports. The bill died in committee.

In June, state lawmakers voted to direct staffers to draft a bill that would extend hate-crime protections, according to the Casper Star Tribune. Burlingame said the bill has since been written and will eventually go before the legislature.

Shepard’s parents, Judy and Dennis, started the Matthew Shepard Foundation after their son died. For more than 20 years, it has pushed lawmakers to pass hate-crime legislation. On its website, the foundation said it helped pioneer the country’s first federal hate-crime legislation in 2009.

But the state where Matthew Shepard lived and was left to die has not. His mother said it’s time for that to change.
“Wyoming has had 22 years to pass Hate Crime legislation and every year our legislators parrot the line that the Equality State doesn’t need this law,” Judy Shepard said in a statement. “It is time for Wyoming to face reality and recognize that we are losing our youth, our economic potential and our soul.”
Burlingame, who served in Wyoming’s House of Representatives for two years in 2019 and 2020, said she hopes the uproar over the shirt will push her former colleagues to finally pass such a law. She said the chair of the judiciary committee was surprised a business would sell the shirt with the violent message.
“It might have convinced him a little more of the need for hate-crimes legislation.”

[Rach3]

From AxiosDesMoines today, the " brown-shirts " on the move :


" It feels like 2024 already as a batch of Republican presidential hopefuls head to Iowa to test their popularity with the state's evangelical Christian base.

Driving the news: Former Vice President Mike Pence is headlining evangelical group The FAMiLY LEADER's tenth annual leadership summit in Des Moines today.

Household names including South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will also speak.

Why it matters: The base, made up of older voters, remains one of the most enthusiastic demographics to turn up at polls, though their numbers and political relevance are decreasing.

The intrigue: The last four years of evangelical support for former President Donald Trump may seem left-field to outsiders who question his adherence to faith.

Iowa Republicans made Sen. Ted Cruz their nominee in 2016. The FAMiLY LEADER's CEO Bob Vander Plaats also endorsed him.
But Trump's actions to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, his Supreme Court appointments and his handling of the Islamic State group have ultimately won them over.
What they want now: A tried conservative who can fill Trump's void if he doesn't decide to run again, Vander Plaats said.

Evangelicals appreciated his "authenticity," though not his demeanor, he said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who made headlines for his opposition to 2020 pandemic shutdowns, could be a frontrunner, as well as Pence and Pompeo.
If Trump does run: Expect his fiery base to elevate him to the top. Then you're looking at who should be his VP pick, such as Noem or Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Vander Plaats said.

As for Gov. Kim Reynolds: Vander Plaats told Iowa Press she would be a "very compelling VP choice."

(Rach3: Several years ago Vande Plaats' group was successful in voting off the Iowa Supreme Court 3 Justices who approved gay marriage in Iowa. The group is headquartered in the US Congressional District formerly represented by right-wing nut Rep. Steve King.)

[Rach3]

WAPO July 18

To Trump’s hard-core supporters, his rallies weren’t politics. They were life.

Michael C. Bender is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the author of “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” from which this article is adapted.
July 16, 2021|Updated today at 10:17 a.m. EDT


Donald Trump soaked in the adoration as he commanded a rally stage inside a massive central Florida arena. I stewed in my seat and stopped taking notes.

It was the third summer of Trump’s presidency, and the event had been billed as the official kickoff of his reelection campaign. What unfolded, however, was effectively the exact same rally I’d already covered at least 50 times since 2016 as a White House and political reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Traditionally, a campaign launch marks an inflection point for a candidate to frame the race, offering a new message or a second-term agenda. But the only differences that day in June 2019 were cosmetic: The sound system was louder, the physical stage grander. Timeworn chants of “Lock her up” and “Build the wall” rippled through the arena, with Trump supporters echoing their favorite lines like childhood friends at a sleepover watching their favorite movie for the umpteenth time.

Then it struck me. The deafening roars and vigorous choruses from the capacity crowd at the 20,000-seat Amway Arena showed that Trump’s supporters were excited to watch a rerun. They’d stood in line for hours or camped overnight — enduring stifling humidity interrupted only by brief bursts of hard, heavy rain — to ensure a spot inside. Now I was rattled. I had let the rallies, which formed the core of one of the most steadfast political movements in modern American history and reordered the Republican Party, turn stale and rote. Why was Trump’s performance still so fresh and resonant for an entire arena of fellow Americans? I spent the next year and a half embedded with a group of Trump’s most hardcore rallygoers — known as the “Front Row Joes” — to try to understand what I’d overlooked.

The answer wasn’t so much what I’d missed as what they had found. They were mostly older White men and women who lived paycheck to paycheck with plenty of time on their hands — retired or close to it, estranged from their families or otherwise without children — and Trump had, in a surprising way, made their lives richer. The president himself almost always spent the night in his own bed and kept few close friends. But his rallies gave the Joes a reason to travel the country, staying at one another’s homes, sharing hotel rooms and carpooling. Two had married — and later divorced — by Trump’s second year in office.

In Trump, they’d found someone whose endless thirst for a fight encouraged them to speak up for themselves, not just in politics but also in relationships and at work. His rallies turned arenas into modern-day tent revivals, where the preacher and the parishioners engaged in an adrenaline-fueled psychic cleansing brought on by chanting and cheering with 15,000 other like-minded loyalists. Saundra Kiczenski, a 56-year-old from Michigan, compared the energy at a Trump rally to the feelings she had as a teenager in 1980 watching the “Miracle on Ice” — when the U.S. Olympic hockey team unexpectedly beat the Soviet Union.
“The whole place is erupting, everyone is screaming, and your heart is beating like, just, oh my God,” Kiczenski told me. “It’s like nothing I’ve experienced in my lifetime.”

Their devotion wasn’t reciprocated. Trump was careless with his supporters’ innocence, as he turned coronavirus tests into political scorecards and painted civil rights protests as a breeding ground for antifa. His last campaign-style event as president, the “Save America” rally on Jan. 6 in Washington, helped fuel a deadly riot at the Capitol that has resulted in the arrests of more than 500 Americans. But the former president still drew thousands to a rural fairground about an hour outside Cleveland last month and to another in central Florida. And the question from June 2019 about what keeps bringing his fans back remains a pressing one for the country — and an urgent one for the Republican Party.

Many of the people facing criminal charges related to the riot have pointed to Trump and his lies about the election as the reason they stormed the symbolic heart of the world’s longest-standing democracy. But those arguments have taken place inside courtrooms. Outside Trump rallies, there are alternative facts.

“It’s ridiculous those people are in prison for no reason,” Kiczenski told me at the Ohio rally last month. “And it’s a shame because if Donald Trump were still the president, they’d all be free.”

What do people get out of a Trump rally in 2021? I went to find out.
The Front Row Joes include several Trump aficionados who had spent decades keeping tabs on his political flirtations, tabloid melodrama and star turns on reality television. But I talked to a surprising number who’d also voted for Barack Obama at least once, attracted to the Democrat’s charisma and fed up with Republicans over foreign adventurism and the growing national debt.

Kiczenski met people like Ben Hirschmann, a Michigan legislative intern who posted on Facebook anytime he had an open seat in his car on the way to a rally. She bonded with Brendan Gutenschwager and flew with him to Hong Kong, where they spent 24 hours waving their red, white and blue Trump flags during protests over China’s extradition laws. She occasionally overnighted about an hour outside Detroit with Judy Chiodo, a fellow Trump rally-trotter, rather than drive all the way home to Sault Ste. Marie.

But 2020 proved grueling for the Joes. In March, Hirschmann was among the first Americans to die of covid-19. His death, at 24, shook his Trump friends. “I talked to him more than my own daughter,” Cindy Hoffman, a 60-year-old Iowa woman who ran a tool-sharpening business, said on a Zoom call that the Joes held to grieve.

Yet within a few months, as Trump’s response to the pandemic became increasingly politicized, the Front Row Joes had pinned Hirschmann’s death on a push for doctors to see patients remotely by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Her changes largely mirrored steps the Trump administration had taken, but she was a Democrat who had emerged as a foil for the president. They also turned on one another, shaming friends who wanted to wear masks or were nervous about attending rallies during the pandemic.

In my red state, people see masks as unmanly. That’s Trump’s fault.When Randal Thom, a 60-year-old ex-Marine with a long gray mustache, fell severely ill with a high fever and debilitating congestion, he refused to go to the hospital. He was a heavy smoker who was significantly overweight and knew he faced an increased risk of severe effects from covid-19. Still, he refused to take a coronavirus test and potentially increase the caseload on Trump’s watch: “I’m not going to add to the numbers,” he told me. Thom survived the scare, but died months later in a car accident while returning home to Minnesota from a Trump boat parade in Florida.

While most Americans only occasionally left their homes, the pandemic proved a blessing for Kiczenski’s Trump travel plans. She bought cheap airfare, repeatedly basked in the extravagance of an airplane aisle all to herself and logged more flights in 2020 than at any other point in her life. She attended 25 Trump rallies, boosting her total to 56. She spent 79 nights of the year away from her bed. Kiczenski traveled so often during the pandemic that a Delta flight attendant thanked her for being a Silver Medallion member and upgraded her to first class; she initially assumed it was a mistake.

Kiczenski was in Washington with friends for the Jan. 6 rally. She was convinced beyond a doubt that Trump had been reelected on Nov. 3, only to have his victory stolen in what she described as “a takeover by the communist devils.” She said she believed that, in part, because she had crossed paths with Corey Lewandowski, a well-known and ubiquitous Trump adviser, in the Trump International Hotel the previous summer. Lewandowski told her, she said, that the only way Trump could lose was if there was massive election fraud.
“If someone put a gun to my head and said: ‘Did Donald Trump win, yes or no? And if you’re wrong, we’re going to shoot your head off!’ I would say yes,” Kiczenski told me. “I’m that confident that this stuff is not made up.”

On Jan. 6, she and her friends made their way to the west side of the Capitol, where a mob pushed through police barricades and turned steel bike racks on their sides, leaning them against stone walls like ladders. Some men helped her climb up the rungs. People were everywhere, and it was difficult to move. Kiczenski and her friends scaled one more wall and were within about 100 yards of the Capitol. But it had become so crowded — they didn’t want to lose one another — that they decided to stop on the west terrace, take pictures and soak up the atmosphere.

They paused in the place where Trump and Vice President Mike Pence had been inaugurated in 2017 amid a crowd of former presidents and against a Capitol decorated in red, white and blue bunting. Now, four years later, Trump’s supporters swarmed the ornate building. Outside that evening, countless Trump flags flapped in the wind. Clouds of tear gas hung in the air against the purple twilight sky, and the orange light glowing from inside the Capitol’s windows gave the scene a surreal, apocalyptic feel.

The Capitol riot shouldn’t have surprised us. Trump forecast it for five years.
Kiczenski was inspired by a vista of Trumpian strength and patriotism: the Washington Monument in the distance, the majestic Capitol in the foreground, and freedom-loving patriots fighting like hell to stop a stolen and fraudulent election, liberate their country and save their president. She snapped pictures and recorded videos.

“It just looked so neat,” she said. “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”

But when Trump posted a video to social media asking supporters to go home (and saying he loved them) after the riot raged for hours, Kiczenski felt confused and depressed. “We were supposed to be fighting until the end,” she said.
She reminded herself that the president hadn’t technically conceded, and as soon as she arrived home in Michigan, she packed for the next Trump trip. Kiczenski trusted that something was coming and wanted a go-bag ready if she needed to leave for a rally at a moment’s notice.
“We’re all on the edge of our seats waiting to hear about the next event,” she said. “Now we’re like an army, and it’s like boots on the ground. Tell us where we need to go!
“The time is now,” she continued, sounding at once urgent and wistful. “It’s time to go.”

And when Trump returned to the rally circuit in June, so did Kiczenski. “We have a lot of down time now that we’re trying to fill,” she told me in Ohio. “It’s basically like we don’t have a president right now.”

[maestrob]

These are citizens?

It looks to me like our 11 million "undocumented" appreciate American democracy more than these old f@rts do.

Too bad for them that they can only win by cheating.

So where's their sense of integrity now?

Never forget.

[Rach3]

From AxiosPM tonight:

" A federal judge just gave colleges their first major win in the battle to require that students be vaccinated.

Why it matters: Many students and parents consider these mandates essential to safely returning to campus. 586 colleges nationwide have some form of vaccine mandate, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Between the lines: That list includes schools that say the vaccines must have full FDA approval. None of the vaccines have full approval.

"Judge Damon R. Leichty of the U.S. District Court for Northern Indiana said that while he recognized the students’ interest in refusing unwarranted medical treatment, such a right must be weighed against the state’s greater interest," the N.Y. Times reports.

His ruling said: "The Fourteenth Amendment permits Indiana University to pursue a reasonable and due process of vaccination in the legitimate interest of public health."

What's next: A lawyer for the plaintiffs said that a conservative group called America’s Frontline Doctors is prepared to bankroll an appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. "

Rach3 : We're going to need a bigger Hell for all these Right.

[maestrob]

From AxiosPM tonight:

" A federal judge just gave colleges their first major win in the battle to require that students be vaccinated.

Why it matters: Many students and parents consider these mandates essential to safely returning to campus. 586 colleges nationwide have some form of vaccine mandate, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Between the lines: That list includes schools that say the vaccines must have full FDA approval. None of the vaccines have full approval.

"Judge Damon R. Leichty of the U.S. District Court for Northern Indiana said that while he recognized the students’ interest in refusing unwarranted medical treatment, such a right must be weighed against the state’s greater interest," the N.Y. Times reports.

His ruling said: "The Fourteenth Amendment permits Indiana University to pursue a reasonable and due process of vaccination in the legitimate interest of public health."

What's next: A lawyer for the plaintiffs said that a conservative group called America’s Frontline Doctors is prepared to bankroll an appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. "

Rach3 : We're going to need a bigger Hell for all these Right.

Gone are the days when the welfare of American citizens had to be the top priority of those in office. Now, only Democrats seem to be willing to serve their country.

I never imagined that this could happen in America. Ever.

Never forget.

[maestrob]

A judge blocked Maryland’s bid to cut off federal unemployment benefits.

By Coral Murphy Marcos
July 13, 2021

A state judge on Thursday blocked a move by Maryland officials to cut off federal pandemic unemployment benefits two months before they were scheduled to expire.

Judge Lawrence P. Fletcher-Hill of the Circuit Court for Baltimore City granted a preliminary injunction in a case challenging the decision by Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, to discontinue the benefits beginning July 3. The judge ordered the state to “immediately take all actions necessary to ensure that Maryland residents continue to receive any and all expanded and/or supplemental unemployment benefits.”

The Maryland Department of Labor did not respond to a request for comment on whether it would appeal the injunction, which is to remain in place until the case comes to trial.

More than two dozen states, all but one led by Republican governors, have moved to cut off some or all of the federal benefits, saying they are discouraging people from seeking work at a time when some businesses are scrambling to staff up as the pandemic fades. The benefits, administered by the states, include a $300 weekly supplement to other unemployment insurance. They are funded by the federal government until Sept. 6.

Legal challenges to the early cutoff of the benefits have been raised in at least five states. In Indiana, the state’s court of appeals ordered officials on Monday to continue paying federal unemployment benefits.

Andrew Stettner, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, said the lawsuits essentially objected to “the rug being pulled out from under unemployed workers who were promised something” through September and were getting a receptive hearing from judges. “It’s a national economic policy,” he said, “but it will play out on a state-by-state basis.”

Oklahoma is the latest state to face a lawsuit seeking to compel it to continue the benefits. A woman in Tulsa filed a lawsuit on Wednesday and said she could not afford her expenses without the additional federal benefits after she lost her job.

Lawsuits in Ohio and Texas are pending.

Coral Murphy Marcos is a business reporter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/busi ... efits.html

[Rach3]

From Daily Beast today:


The FBI has revealed that it received 4,500 tips during its investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh but it only passed along some of them to White House lawyers, ignoring countless others.

In a June 30 letter to Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Chris Coons (D-DE), an FBI assistant director, Jill Tyson, said that “all relevant tips” from a batch of 4,500 received during a 2018 investigation into former President Donald Trump’s top pick for the court were passed off to the office of Trump’s White House counsel Don McGahn, whose handling of them remains unclear.

It also was unclear from the letter whether or not the agency had tracked down any of those leads and how many were in fact consequential.

In an apparent effort to justify its handling of the investigation, the FBI said it was conducting a background check rather than a criminal investigation, which meant that “the authorities, policies, and procedures used to investigate criminal matters did not apply,” according to the letter.

Whitehouse blasted FBI director Chris Wray in a statement on Thursday afternoon.

“This long-delayed answer confirms how badly we were spun by Director Wray and the FBI in the Kavanaugh background investigation and hearing,” he wrote on Twitter.

“I charged that the ‘tip line’ was really a tip dump, with all the tips going straight into the dumpster without investigation. In fact it was a tip dump where all the tips went straight to White House Counsel without investigation. Same difference.”

A former classmate, Christine Blasey Ford, alleged that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were at a party in high school during the 1980s. After she agreed to testify in a bombshell nomination hearing, two other women, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, also came forward with sexual misconduct allegations that Kavanaugh bluntly denied.

Under pressure from Democrats, Trump directed McGahn to broaden the scope of the FBI’s investigations into the allegations, but to cater to Senate Republicans and to do it quickly. Kavanaugh was eventually confirmed.


On Wednesday, the Rhode Island lawmaker and six Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee fired back in response to Tyson’s revelation about the passed-off tips, demanding more information about the agency’s discussions with White House lawyers and questioning why the FBI declined to interview Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh.

“Your letter confirms that the FBI’s tip line was a departure from past practice and that the FBI was politically constrained by the Trump White House,” the senators wrote on Wednesday. “It also belies the former president’s insistence that his administration did not limit the Bureau’s investigation of Justice Kavanaugh.”

The sheer number of tips that appear to have been ignored corroborates claims by individuals and firms who said they had contacted the FBI with credible accounts relevant to the investigation “only to be ignored,” the senators said.

“If the FBI was not authorized to or did not follow up on any of the tips that it received from the tip line, it is difficult to understand the point of having a tip line at all,” they added.

Tyson’s correspondence comes years after Whitehouse and Coons initially wrote to Wray in 2019, demanding answers about how his agency had overseen its review of Kavanaugh.

Blasey Ford, now a professor, and Kavanaugh, who was sworn into the Supreme Court in 2018, were each questioned during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in September of that year.

The FBI’s latest revelation also sheds light on the depths of Trump’s efforts to push Kavanaugh’s confirmation by quashing the investigation into his past.

During an interview with Michael Wolff for his book Landslide, Trump reportedly asked: "Where would he be without me?” Referring to Kavanaugh he said: “I saved his life. He wouldn't even be in a law firm. Who would have had him? Nobody. Totally disgraced. Only I saved him.”

In response to the Justice Department’s letter, lawyers for Blasey Ford said it confirmed that the FBI’s investigation was “a sham and a major institutional failure.”

“This never should have been an ordinary background check. The FBI should have referred the evidence it was receiving to the Criminal Investigation Division,” attorneys Debra Katz and Lisa Banks wrote in a statement.

“FBI Director Wray must answer the question as to why he failed to do so.”

[maestrob]

A Foreign Agent in Trump’s Inner Circle?

July 23, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Once upon a time, it would have been huge news if the chairman of the former president’s inaugural committee was indicted on charges of acting as an agent of a foreign power.

Donald Trump’s presidency, however, has left us with scandal inflation. At this point many of the leading figures from his 2016 campaign have been either indicted or convicted, even if they were later pardoned. The C.F.O. of Trump’s company was charged with tax fraud less a month ago.

So when the billionaire real estate investor Tom Barrack, one of Trump’s biggest fund-raisers, was arrested on Tuesday and charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the United Arab Emirates along with other felonies, it might have seemed like a dog-bites-man story. Barrack was once described by longtime Trump strategist Roger Stone — a felon, naturally — as the ex-president’s best friend. If you knew nothing else about Barrack but that, you might have guessed he’d end up in handcuffs.

Nevertheless, Barrack’s arrest is important. Trump’s dealings with the Emirates and Saudi Arabia deserve to be investigated as thoroughly as his administration’s relationship with Russia. So far that hasn’t happened. When Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, testified before Congress, Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said to him, “We did not bother to ask whether financial inducements from any Gulf nations were influencing U.S. policy, since it is outside the four corners of your report, and so we must find out.” But we have not found out.

A Barrack trial, if the case goes that far, is unlikely to answer all the outstanding questions about how Gulf money shaped Trump policy. But it could answer some.

Let’s recall that Russia was not the only nation to send emissaries to Trump Tower during the presidential campaign offering election help. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian election interference discusses an August 2016 Trump Tower meeting whose attendees included Donald Trump Jr., George Nader, then an adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the Emirates’ de facto ruler, and Joel Zamel, owner of an Israeli private intelligence company, Psy-Group. (Nader is currently in prison for child sex trafficking and possession of child pornography.)

“Zamel asked Trump Jr. whether Psy-Group’s conducting a social media campaign paid for by Nader would present a conflict for the Trump campaign,” said the Senate report. “According to Zamel, Trump Jr. indicated that this would not present a conflict.”

Zamel told the Senate Committee that his company never actually performed such work. “Nonetheless, as described below, Zamel engaged in work on behalf of Nader, for which he was paid in excess of $1 million,” said the report. Zamel claimed the payment was for a postelection social media analysis, all copies of which were ostensibly deleted.

If the allegations in the Barrack indictment are true, it means that while an adviser to the Emirates was offering the Trump campaign election help, an Emirati agent was also shaping Trump’s foreign policy, even inserting the country’s preferred language into one of the candidate’s speeches. Prosecutors say that Barrack told a high-level figure they call “Emirati Official 2” that he had staffed the Trump campaign. (It was Barrack who recommended Paul Manafort, later to be convicted of multiple felonies, to Trump.) When an Emirati official asked Barrack if he had information about senior Trump appointees, Barrack allegedly replied, “I do” and said they should talk by phone. He is said to have traveled to the Emirates to strategize with its leadership about what they wanted from the administration during its first 100 days, first six months, first year and first term.

In the early months of the Trump administration, prosecutors say another alleged Emirati agent named Rashid Sultan Rashid Al Malik Alshahhi — also indicted on Tuesday — texted Barrack: “Our ppl wants u to help. They were hoping you can officially run the agendas.” According to the indictment, Barrack replied, “I will!” Later, Barrack reportedly called Alshahhi “the secret weapon to get Abu Dhabi’s plan initiated” by Trump.

At the time, several Arab countries, including the Emirates, were blockading Qatar. Even as the Pentagon and the State Department attempted to remain neutral in the crisis, Trump sent tweets that appeared to support the blockade and even take credit for it.

Throughout his presidency, Trump could scarcely have been a more accommodating ally to the Emirates and to Saudi Arabia, whose crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was a protégé of Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. Trump’s first foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia. He tore up the Iran deal, hated by Gulf Arab leaders. Of Trump’s 10 presidential vetoes, five dealt with issues of concern to the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. More significantly, he overrode Congress’s attempt to end American military involvement in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and the Emirates were fighting on one side of a brutal civil war. According to Bob Woodward’s book “Rage,” Trump boasted that he “saved” the Saudi crown prince after the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi elicited widespread outrage.

There is no reason to attribute all of Trump’s solicitude to Barrack. Trump likes and admires gaudy dictators and has his own financial interests in the Emirates. Barrack introduced Jared Kushner to some of his Gulf associates, but Kushner had his own reasons for pursuing alliances with them, particularly his push to get more Muslim countries to normalize relations with Israel. Still, if a member of Trump’s inner circle turns out to have been an Emirati agent, that’s a big deal. It’s a reminder of all we still don’t know about what went into the foreign policy of the most corrupt presidency in American history.

In June 2018, The Times reported that Barrack’s company “has raised more than $7 billion in investments since Mr. Trump won the nomination,” about a quarter from either the Emirates or Saudi Arabia. Barrack stepped down from his executive role at that company in March, but just last week he told Bloomberg Television that Emiratis would be among his investors in a new venture involving “mega resorts” and “the hospitality industry as it relates to wellness, as it relates to health.” Americans deserve to know if Barrack essentially sold his investors influence over the foreign policy of the United States. The market for Trump scandal may be glutted, but when it comes to the role of foreign money in the last administration, there’s no shortage of mysteries.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/opin ... e=Homepage

[Rach3]

One of the Right's heroes.From Huffington Post today:

Michael Flynn Boasts Maybe He'll 'Find Somebody In Washington' With His New AR-15

Mary Papenfuss
Mon, July 26, 2021, 6:19 AM

Disgraced Trump administration figure Michael Flynn boasted on Sunday that maybe he’ll “find somebody” in Washington with a new assault-style rifle a California church gave him.

Flynn, the former national security adviser pardoned by Donald Trump for lying about his Russia contacts, made the jaw-dropping remark after he was gifted the gun at the “Church of Glad Tidings” in Yuba City, California. Church members roared with laughter and clapped when Flynn suggested hunting humans in the nation’s capital.

“We were trying to come up with a rifle that we thought was appropriate for a general, so we went with an old-school Woodland camouflage ... one of our top-quality guns,” said Jason Parker, who works for a gun company. The weapon he presented to Flynn appeared to be a Woodland Camo AR-15.

A smiling Flynn responded loudly: “Maybe I’ll find somebody in Washington, D.C.”

Rachel Vindman, wife of whistleblower Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, was among those who denounced Flynn on Twitter. She said Flynn, a retired Army general, “should be recalled to active duty and court-martialed.”

[maestrob]

Rachel Vindman, wife of whistleblower Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, was among those who denounced Flynn on Twitter. She said Flynn, a retired Army general, “should be recalled to active duty and court-martialed.”

Should have happened after he was convicted of lying to the FBI.

[Rach3]

Yesterday at 6:05 p.m. EDT WAPO


Across the country, GOP lawmakers are rallying around the cause of individual freedom to counter community-based disease mitigation methods, moves experts say leave the country ill-equipped to counter the resurgent coronavirus and a future, unknown outbreak.

In some states, anger at perceived overreach by health officials has prompted legislative attempts to limit their authority, including new state laws that prevent the closure of businesses or allow lawmakers to rescind mask mandates. Some state courts have reined in the emergency and regulatory powers governors have wielded against the virus. And in its recent rulings and analysis, the U.S. Supreme Court has signaled its willingness to limit disease mitigation in the name of religious freedom.

“The legal framework has evolved in ways that will complicate and perhaps undermine efforts to deal with the next public health crisis or even routine health threats,” said Wendy Parmet, director of the Northeastern University Center for Health Policy and Law, who also said she has been a “long critic of emergency laws and their potential for abuse.”



A key issue, Parmet and others say, is that the legislative backlash is based on partisan assumptions about this pandemic, limiting states’ options in the face of a new threat.

“Whatever your feelings are about what health officials did in March of 2020, I can talk to you about a future threat that might be different, that would disproportionately affect a different population, that you would feel differently about,” said Lindsay F. Wiley, director of the Health Law and Policy Program at American University and an expert on emergency reform. “Please don’t constrain authority as a reaction in a way that will tie officials to the mast for a future crisis.”

At least 15 state legislatures have passed or are considering measures to limit the legal authority of public health agencies, according to the Network for Public Health Law, which partnered with the National Association of County and City Health Officials to document the legislative counterpunches. Lawmakers in at least 46 states have introduced hundreds of bills relating to legislative oversight of gubernatorial or executive actions during coronavirus or other emergencies, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The measures, as described by the Network for Public Health Law, include a North Dakota law that prohibits a mask mandate, even during an outbreak of tuberculosis, and a new Montana law that prohibits the use of quarantine to separate people who have probably been infected or exposed but are not yet sick. Many bills are modeled on legislation originally crafted by conservative think tanks and activist groups, according to state lawmakers who introduced them.

Among them is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has touted its model legislation aimed at reining in emergency powers so it is more “narrowly tailored to serve a compelling public health or safety purpose.”
In an interview, Jonathon Hauenschild, ALEC’s staff policy expert on the model legislation, said that from early in the pandemic he viewed governors’ use of emergency powers as problematic.
“I started to see . . . that once a branch realizes power they didn’t have before, they don’t give it up unless they are forced to,” Hauenschild said. “Some governors still aren’t giving up their power.”

The group’s legislative members wrote their model Emergency Limitation Act in 2020. It was finalized in early January, in time for states’ new legislative sessions.
Hauenschild said he has seen the model act’s influence in new laws in Indiana and Kentucky, where certain emergency orders now expire after 30 days unless the General Assembly approves an extension and there are new protections to purchase firearms. The group’s model legislation, which public health experts believe would leave states relatively defenseless in an emergency, is not motivated by ideology, Hauenschild argues.
“It’s really just trying to inject a little bit of accountability into the system,” he said.

ALEC is not the only conservative group behind the flurry of recent bills.

An aide to Massachusetts state Rep. Nicholas Boldyga (R) said his office worked with Pacific Legal Foundation, a Sacramento-based libertarian group, on legislation imposing a 30-day sunset on emergency orders. Daniel Dew, legal policy director for the Pacific Legal Foundation, estimated that the group has had discussions with lawmakers in more than half the states and has been able to trace at least 18 bills to its model legislation or other activities.

Montana state Rep. Matt Regier (R) said he received input from the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the political network funded by the Koch fortune, on his bill, which limits the sort of executive actions that can be taken during an emergency, including by enshrining certain religious exemptions and ensuring the legislature gets to weigh in after 45 days. The measure gained approval in May over Democratic objections, and it was signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte.

Resistance to vaccine mandates is building. A powerful network is helping.
Gianforte’s support averted an intraparty squabble like those in other states against the powers of Republican governors. In March, Ohio’s legislature overrode a veto by Gov. Mike DeWine (R) in response to the approval of a bill giving lawmakers the power to rescind executive actions taken by the governor or state health authorities. State Sen. Rob McColley, a Republican co-sponsor of the legislation, said he had no qualms going against a governor of his own party.
That’s because McColley, like other advocates of similar legislation, views the incursions on personal liberty as grievous enough to rival the loss of life from the pandemic. “Coronavirus is serious, but we can’t make decisions in a vacuum,” he said.

“I start with this premise: If you would have asked any of us in January or February of 2020 if we could ever have foreseen the amount of unprecedented executive authority used over the coming 12 to 15 months, many of us would have scoffed at that idea,” McColley added. “No way that would happen in a country like the United States, in a state like Ohio. Yet it did.”

The recent passage of Ohio’s SB 22 has left local officials grappling to understand its future effect on everything from closing restaurants to quarantining residents.
Keary McCarthy, executive director of the Ohio Mayors Alliance, said that in a public health emergency, local officials need immediate clarity.
“If executive and legislative branches get into a dispute about all of these things, it really creates some challenges for local officials,” McCarthy said. “What are the rules? How do we implement them? How do we keep our folks safe?”

The measures are also motivated by the perceived randomness of some business restrictions. Particularly irksome to Boldyga, the Massachusetts lawmaker, was a rule against golf carts, which was designed to limit the use of shared equipment and lifted last May. “A golf cart was too difficult to be in by yourself because of covid, I guess,” he said. “It was absurd.”

Eighteen months ago, few people anticipated an infection that was as deadly, spread as stealthily or acted as disproportionately on certain groups in the way the coronavirus has done. With responsibility for protecting the public’s health falling historically to state and local government, many governors turned to general emergency powers, intended for disruptive but short-lived events like wildfires or tornadoes. As the pandemic persisted, they re-upped their powers, with many GOP lawmakers fighting back.

Some battles between Democratic governors and Republican-controlled legislatures have landed in state courts. The supreme courts of Michigan and Wisconsin, respectively, ruled that their governors didn’t have the power to renew executive orders relating to the pandemic or to declare multiple public health emergencies.

And in Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis (D), who has been under fire from Republican legislators, took matters into his own hands, announcing last month that he would phase out his emergency powers. In New York, some fellow Democrats earlier this year moved to strip Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) of unilateral emergency powers.

In some places, legislators are taking aim at laws that have been on the books for decades. In Tennessee, lawmakers have focused their ire on the Mature Minor Doctrine, which stems from a 1987 state Supreme Court ruling allowing clinicians to provide care including family planning, substance-abuse treatment and in some instances vaccines to adolescents without parental consent.

Michelle Fiscus was Tennessee’s immunization manager until she was fired for what she argued were political reasons.
The state’s immunization manager, Michelle Fiscus, had alluded to the doctrine in a memo circulated to enrolled vaccine providers. The information enraged some conservative lawmakers, who disputed the doctrine’s validity.

Less than a month later, Fiscus was fired for what she argued were political reasons and the state scaled back on adolescent vaccine outreach.
“It’s an absolute travesty that individuals are putting their own political agenda ahead of the health and well-being of the people they were elected to serve,” Fiscus said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Tennessee Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey said Friday that almost all vaccine outreach was being restarted, with the exception of 11 social media posts that depicted a child without a parent. The pause in communications, she said, was to ensure that all forms of outreach — from postcard reminders to consent forms — “were appropriately directed at parents and not kids.”

Public health law has long been controversial. In 2001, when the country was comparatively united following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent anthrax mailings, model legislation that has since been adopted by at least 40 states and some countries was met with opposition, including from the left and center.

It “turns governors into dictators,” the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons wrote about the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, by empowering them “to create a police state by fiat, and for a sufficient length of time to destroy or muzzle [their] political opposition.”

The act, which strengthened powers to respond to public health emergencies, largely withstood the tests of Zika and Ebola. It anticipated the need for mask mandates and social distancing but failed to foresee other characteristics of the current pandemic — including lockdowns in America’s biggest cities, said Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University who drafted the act.
“We are always looking back at the current or past crisis, not the future crisis,” Gostin said.


While some scholars believe that in any future pandemic the federal government would step in to play a greater role, others are focused on new model legislation for states to adopt.
A group of lawyers at the Uniform Law Commission, a nonprofit with representatives from each state appointed by the state government, have formed a study committee to look into reforming public health legislation.
Diane Boyer-Vine, the ULC’s vice president, said the partisan divide makes the challenges of drafting enactable legislation daunting.
“I don’t think that is going to be easy, envisioning how we are going to draft this,” she said. “We have to represent the Californias and the Alabamas.”

[Rach3]

The Trump Traitors continue to meet:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mark-meadows ... 00892.html

The strategy is probably to win control of Congress in 2022, put a stop then to all the investigations, de-fund FBI and DOJ, then re-elect Trump in 2024. It's uncertain either Congress or DOJ or FBI could complete any work they have already begun , or Biden or Garland orders them to do , before either date.

[maestrob]

The Trump Traitors continue to meet:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mark-meadows ... 00892.html

The strategy is probably to win control of Congress in 2022, put a stop then to all the investigations, de-fund FBI and DOJ, then re-elect Trump in 2024. It's uncertain either Congress or DOJ or FBI could complete any work they have already begun , or Biden or Garland orders them to do , before either date.

How many times do we have to say: There just isn't much time left.....

Never forget.

[Rach3]

Florida's criminal GOP:

Associated Press
Florida breaks record for COVID-19 hospitalizations
MIKE SCHNEIDER
Sun, August 1, 2021, 12:41 PM
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A day after it recorded the most new daily cases since the start of the pandemic, Florida on Sunday broke a previous record for current hospitalizations set more than a year ago before vaccines were available.

The Sunshine State had 10,207 people hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 cases, according to data reported to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

The previous record was from July 23, 2020, more than a half-year before vaccinations started becoming widespread, when Florida had 10,170 hospitalizations, according to the Florida Hospital Association.

Florida is now leading the nation in per capita hospitalizations for COVID-19, as hospitals around the state report having to put emergency room visitors in beds in hallways and others document a noticeable drop in the age of patients.

In the past week, Florida has averaged 1,525 adult hospitalizations a day, and 35 daily pediatric hospitalizations. Both are the highest per capita rate in the nation, according to Jason Salemi, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of South Florida.

The hospitalizations and increasing cases have come as the new, more transmittable delta variant has spread throughout Florida, and residents have returned to pre-pandemic activities.

“The recent rise is both striking and not-at-all surprising,” Salemi said in an email late Saturday.

Federal health data released Saturday showed that Florida reported 21,683 new cases of COVID-19, the state’s highest one-day total since the start of the pandemic. The latest numbers were recorded on Friday and released on Saturday on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website. The figures show how quickly the number of cases is rising in the Sunshine State: only a day earlier, Florida reported 17,093 new daily cases.

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has resisted mandatory mask mandates and vaccine requirements, and along with the state Legislature, has limited local officials’ ability to impose restrictions meant to stop the spread of COVID-19. DeSantis on Friday barred school districts from requiring students to wear masks when classes resume next month.

Florida's Democratic agriculture commissioner, Nikki Fried, who is seeking to run against DeSantis for governor, on Sunday urged unvaccinated Floridians to get the shots. She said she was heartened by a recent uptick in vaccinations in the state.

“We are already behind the curve and in a worse spot every time the numbers come out," Fried said at a news conference in Tallahassee. “This surge is and will impact every single one of us."

Throughout Florida, from Jacksonville to Miami to Tampa, hospitals have become overwhelmed.

Barry Burton, the Pinellas County administrator, told the Tampa Bay Times that some local hospitals are already having to divert ambulances to different locations because of capacity concerns.

There has been a startling rise in the number of children with the virus at hospitals in Miami, many of them requiring intensive care.

Memorial Health’s Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood had seven patients with COVID-19. At Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, there were 17 patients with COVID-19 on Friday, including six in the ICU and one who needed a ventilator, Dr. Marcos Mestre, vice president and chief medical officer, told the Miami Herald.

About half of the patients were under 12, Mestre said, and the rest were older and eligible for the vaccine. But none of the patients with COVID-19 at Nicklaus Children’s on Friday were vaccinated. Most children who get COVID-19 do not need hospitalization, Mestre said.

In the state capital, COVID-19 hospitalizations reached 70 patients on Sunday at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare, a jump of 11 people in two days.

“This is the most we’ve ever had,” Stephanie Derzypolski, a hospital spokeswoman, told the Tallahassee Democrat.

The Mayo Clinic hospital in Jacksonville said it had exceeded its capacity of 304 licensed beds due to COVID-19 cases and asked the Agency for Health Care Administration for permission to operate overcapacity until the current surge ends, First Coast News in Jacksonville reported Sunday.

At the UF Health North hospital emergency room in Jacksonville, COVID-19 patients once again were being put in beds in hallways due to a surge in visits.

For many hospital workers, up until a month ago, it looked like there was light at the end of the tunnel, as people got vaccinated and hospitalizations decreased. But then the summer surge, powered by the new delta variant, hit Florida in July.

“That light did turn out to be a train in this case,” Marsha Tittle, a nursing manager at UF Health North, told The Florida Times Union. “We’re taking more patients than we normally would take. ... My staff is wonderful. You walk out there, they’re going to have smiles on their faces and they’re doing a great job. But there’s a sense of defeat, like they’re just defeated.”

[maestrob]

We are running a terrible social experiment in this country reminiscent of the kind of sick stuff that happened in Nazi Germany, and our population at large just happens to be the victims of the scandalous power struggle at the top of our political structure. We are ALL victims of the sociopathic "personal freedom" philosophy of the Right as we mask up in blue states again and pray that a new vaccine-resistant variant doesn't magically pop up and crash our economy again.

ALL of the current covid-related deaths (OK, 99 & 44/100%) are now completely preventable now that we have incredibly effective vaccines in sufficient quantity that there's even talk about masses of expiring doses and booster/third shots.

Imagine if we had been like this when the polio vaccine was rolled out when I was a kid. I might have spent my life in a wheelchair, for all I know! And, yes, it took a government mandate to get shots into arms when I was 9 years old, but so what? It worked, and people co-operated.

What's happening now is all so sickening and unnecessary. Will we ever wake up from this nightmare?

Never forget.