From IPR tonight about the Iowa Fuehrer's State of the State address:
"Gov. Kim Reynolds called for a flat income tax (Rach3: Current top rate to go from 9 % to 4%, low income would pay the same 4 % as the rich ) , cuts to unemployment benefits (Rach3:From 26 weeks to 16 ), and state-funded scholarships for students to transfer to private schools (Rach3:"Private" as in alt.Right academies), in her Condition of the State speech Tuesday evening. She said the condition of the state is strong, highlighting the state's budget surplus in the last fiscal year and nearly $1 billion in cash reserves ( Rach3: Thanks to the COVID payments).The governor also introduced a proposal that would require schools to list all the titles of their textbooks and all of the books held in their libraries online.
A panel of state representatives has advanced the first pair of bills to come out of the governor’s child care task force. One bill would allow child care centers to collect additional money from families who get government-funded child care assistance to help make up what the government pays and the actual price. Rep. Ann Meyer, R-Fort Dodge, says families don’t have to pay more under this bill, but that it would be an option. The other bill that advanced would loosen the minimum staffing requirements for caring for toddlers, which could open up more child care slots. “
Sieg heil !
TrumpReich in action
Re: TrumpReich in action
I no longer expect anything resembling integrity from the slimeball party.
Re: TrumpReich in action
At the risk of giving him publicity, some feel more Trump rallies coverage by "mainstream media" would expose him rather than help him. from NYT today:
WASHINGTON — During a rally in Arizona on Saturday, former President Donald J. Trump repeated his lie that the 2020 election was stolen and made other false claims about the pandemic and the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year. Here’s a fact check.
WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID
“The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating, white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics.”
False. There is no evidence that white Americans are being denied access to vaccines or treatments.
Mr. Trump referred to a Wall Street Journal opinion column criticizing New York State’s guidelines on two limited antiviral treatments that ask health providers to prioritize the therapies for immunocompromised patients and those with risk factors. The guidelines, which were released in late December, said, “Nonwhite race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from Covid-19.”
State officials have defended their guidelines by citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which show that Black, Hispanic and Native Americans are about twice as likely to die from Covid-19 than white Americans. A spokeswoman for New York State’s Department of Health told Fox News that race did not disqualify patients from treatment but that the guidelines instead considered race as one risk factor.
In New York, white residents are more likely to be vaccinated than Black residents, which is in line with most of the country.
WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID
“Why did Nancy Pelosi and the Capitol Police reject the more than 10,000 National Guard troops or soldiers that I authorized to help control the enormous crowd that I knew was coming?”
False. There is no evidence that Mr. Trump ever made a request for 10,000 National Guard troops or that Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected such a demand. The speaker of the House does not control the National Guard.
Vanity Fair reported that Mr. Trump had floated the 10,000 figure to the acting defense secretary at the time, Christopher C. Miller, the night before Jan. 6, 2021, when Mr. Trump’s loyalists stormed the Capitol in a bid to stop the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election victory. According to Mr. Miller, Mr. Trump had suggested 10,000 National Guard troops were required to contain the crowd he anticipated for his rally that day.
But there is no record of Mr. Trump making that request. The Pentagon’s timeline of events leading up to the riot notes that the Defense Department reviewed a plan to activate 340 members of the District of Columbia’s National Guard, “if asked.” But the timeline makes no mention of a request for 10,000 troops by Mr. Trump. Nor did a Pentagon inspector general report on the breach, which instead referred to suggestions by Mr. Trump that his rally on Jan. 6 had been conducted safely. A Pentagon spokesman also told The Washington Post that it had “no record of such an order being given.”
WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID
“So we lost, they say, by 10,000 and yet they flagged more than — listen to these numbers — 57,000 highly suspicious ballots for further investigation, one. Twenty-three thousand, three hundred and forty-four mail-in ballots were counted despite the person no longer living at that address — little, little problem. Five thousand people appear to have voted in more than one county.”
False. Mr. Trump lost the state of Arizona by about 10,500 votes, but his claim of tens of thousands of fraudulent votes is baseless. These figures are based on a report by Cyber Ninjas, a company Republicans hired to examine voting in the state.
Election officials have said that the claims the company raised are not evidence of fraud. For example, Cyber Ninjas found that tens of thousands of voters did not live at addresses recorded by a specific commercial database, but election officials have noted that college students, military personnel or people who own vacation homes could have different addresses than those listed in the database. Similarly, the company’s claims of double voting could be explained by the mere fact that many Arizona residents have the same name or birth year.
Moreover, Cyber Ninjas’ audit showed that in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, Mr. Biden had 99 additional votes and Mr. Trump had 261 fewer votes.
WASHINGTON — During a rally in Arizona on Saturday, former President Donald J. Trump repeated his lie that the 2020 election was stolen and made other false claims about the pandemic and the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year. Here’s a fact check.
WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID
“The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating, white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics.”
False. There is no evidence that white Americans are being denied access to vaccines or treatments.
Mr. Trump referred to a Wall Street Journal opinion column criticizing New York State’s guidelines on two limited antiviral treatments that ask health providers to prioritize the therapies for immunocompromised patients and those with risk factors. The guidelines, which were released in late December, said, “Nonwhite race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from Covid-19.”
State officials have defended their guidelines by citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which show that Black, Hispanic and Native Americans are about twice as likely to die from Covid-19 than white Americans. A spokeswoman for New York State’s Department of Health told Fox News that race did not disqualify patients from treatment but that the guidelines instead considered race as one risk factor.
In New York, white residents are more likely to be vaccinated than Black residents, which is in line with most of the country.
WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID
“Why did Nancy Pelosi and the Capitol Police reject the more than 10,000 National Guard troops or soldiers that I authorized to help control the enormous crowd that I knew was coming?”
False. There is no evidence that Mr. Trump ever made a request for 10,000 National Guard troops or that Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected such a demand. The speaker of the House does not control the National Guard.
Vanity Fair reported that Mr. Trump had floated the 10,000 figure to the acting defense secretary at the time, Christopher C. Miller, the night before Jan. 6, 2021, when Mr. Trump’s loyalists stormed the Capitol in a bid to stop the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election victory. According to Mr. Miller, Mr. Trump had suggested 10,000 National Guard troops were required to contain the crowd he anticipated for his rally that day.
But there is no record of Mr. Trump making that request. The Pentagon’s timeline of events leading up to the riot notes that the Defense Department reviewed a plan to activate 340 members of the District of Columbia’s National Guard, “if asked.” But the timeline makes no mention of a request for 10,000 troops by Mr. Trump. Nor did a Pentagon inspector general report on the breach, which instead referred to suggestions by Mr. Trump that his rally on Jan. 6 had been conducted safely. A Pentagon spokesman also told The Washington Post that it had “no record of such an order being given.”
WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID
“So we lost, they say, by 10,000 and yet they flagged more than — listen to these numbers — 57,000 highly suspicious ballots for further investigation, one. Twenty-three thousand, three hundred and forty-four mail-in ballots were counted despite the person no longer living at that address — little, little problem. Five thousand people appear to have voted in more than one county.”
False. Mr. Trump lost the state of Arizona by about 10,500 votes, but his claim of tens of thousands of fraudulent votes is baseless. These figures are based on a report by Cyber Ninjas, a company Republicans hired to examine voting in the state.
Election officials have said that the claims the company raised are not evidence of fraud. For example, Cyber Ninjas found that tens of thousands of voters did not live at addresses recorded by a specific commercial database, but election officials have noted that college students, military personnel or people who own vacation homes could have different addresses than those listed in the database. Similarly, the company’s claims of double voting could be explained by the mere fact that many Arizona residents have the same name or birth year.
Moreover, Cyber Ninjas’ audit showed that in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, Mr. Biden had 99 additional votes and Mr. Trump had 261 fewer votes.
Re: TrumpReich in action
From WAPO oped today:Rach3 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 17, 2022 10:03 amAt the risk of giving him publicity, some feel more Trump rallies coverage by "mainstream media" would expose him rather than help him. from NYT today:
WASHINGTON — During a rally in Arizona on Saturday, former President Donald J. Trump repeated his lie that the 2020 election was stolen and made other false claims about the pandemic and the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year. Here’s a fact check.
Opinion: Trump’s Arizona project shows the dire threat to American democracy
By Paul Waldman
Columnist
Today at 10:30 a.m. EST
".... Former president Donald Trump went there Saturday for a rally of the faithful, and what was most disturbing wasn’t even Trump’s own litany of lies and conspiracy theories. If you sat through Trump’s tired recitation of the old hits, you’d think he was slipping into irrelevance, a pathetic loser trying to convince a dwindling cadre of fans he was still relevant.
No, what mattered about the event was the parade of Arizona politicians who came to pay tribute to him, one more deranged than the next, each there because they hope they can ride Trump’s support to their own positions of power.
And they just might.
Amid the expected GOP congressmen and right-wing media figures was Kari Lake, the former local news anchor whose campaign for Arizona governor is based on her embrace of Trump’s election lies. She has said the leading Democratic candidate, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, should be imprisoned for presiding over a fair election in 2020. Trump has endorsed Lake, and she leads in primary polls.
And there was secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, whom Trump has also endorsed. You probably haven’t heard of Finchem, but it is almost impossible to exaggerate what a fanatic he is. He came to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, to protest the election, and he maintains that the vote in Arizona was stolen. Finchem is a QAnon conspiracy theorist who says there are “a whole lot of elected officials” who participate “in a pedophile network in the distribution of children.” He is also a self-proclaimed member of the far-right Oath Keepers.
Imagine for a moment: It’s 2024, we have an incredibly close presidential election, and it all comes down to Arizona, where the election is being run by an Oath Keeper and QAnon conspiracy theorist who has devoted himself to the mission of making sure Donald Trump gets elected.
If that doesn’t frighten you, I don’t know what would...."
Re: TrumpReich in action
Rach3 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 5:23 pmSieg Heil !
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... elections/
Great line!The bottom line is there is no widespread election fraud in Florida,” said Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren, a Democrat. “It’s a microscopic amount. Elections today are the most secure that they have ever been. This is not a serious policy proposal. This is a door prize for a QAnon pep rally.”
Re: TrumpReich in action
Surprise,surprise Texas claims short on voter registration forms:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/citing- ... 00547.html
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/citing- ... 00547.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
Rach3 wrote: ↑Fri Jan 21, 2022 11:53 amSurprise,surprise Texas claims short on voter registration forms:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/citing- ... 00547.html
Indeed. That's why we live in New York!The deadline to register to vote for the Mar. 1st Texas primary election is Jan. 31st. People older than 65 and who qualify automatically to vote by mail can’t get mail-in ballots because of the new law. It looks like another case of Texas being Texas.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Top Jan. 6 Investigator Fired From Post at the University of Virginia
Democrats in Virginia denounced the action as a partisan move aimed at helping former President Donald J. Trump undercut the investigation of the Capitol riot.
By Michael S. Schmidt
Published Jan. 23, 2022
Updated Jan. 24, 2022, 7:06 a.m. ET
The top staff investigator on the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has been fired by the state’s new Republican attorney general from his position as the top lawyer for the University of Virginia, from which he was on leave while working on the congressional inquiry.
The office of the Virginia attorney general, Jason S. Miyares, said the firing of the investigator, Timothy J. Heaphy, was not related to the Jan. 6 investigation, but the move prompted an outcry from Democrats in the state, who accused him of taking the highly unusual action as a partisan move to further former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to undermine the committee’s work.
“This is purely payback for Jan. 6 — there is no other reason that makes any sense,” said Scott Surovell, a top Democrat in the Virginia State Senate, who said that he knew of no other similar example in recent history where a new attorney general had immediately removed a school’s top lawyer. “In our state, we normally leave those decisions to the school’s board of visitors and president.”
Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for Mr. Miyares, said: “The decision had nothing to do with the Jan. 6 committee or their investigations.”
In Virginia, the attorney general oversees a range of lawyers across the state, including the top lawyers at the colleges and universities that make up the vast public higher education system. The posts are typically held by career lawyers who are rarely replaced when new attorneys general take over.
In addition to dismissing Mr. Heaphy, Mr. Miyares also had the top lawyer at George Mason University removed.
Mr. Heaphy, a Democrat who has made political donations to Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr., had been the top lawyer at the University of Virginia since 2018. He served as a United States attorney in Virginia during the Obama administration and is married to the daughter of Eric K. Shinseki, the retired chief of staff of the Army who served as President Barack Obama’s secretary of veterans affairs. In 2017, on behalf of the City of Charlottesville, he completed a highly critical report of how the police handled the white nationalist rally that turned violent and led to the death of one woman and injured dozens.
In a written statement, the University of Virginia sidestepped the issue of whether his dismissal had been motivated by politics, but made clear that it had no role in it.
“University leaders are grateful to Tim for his outstanding service to our community and disappointed to see it come to an end,” said Brian Coy, a spokesman for the university. “If you have further questions about this matter, I would check with the attorney general’s office, as this was their decision to make.”
Mr. Heaphy — who attended undergraduate and law school at the University of Virginia, who has long lived in Charlottesville and whose son attends the school — declined to address why he was dismissed, saying that he was “disappointed” that his time at the university had come to an end and that he was confident that the school would continue “to thrive in the days to come.”
In two statements released on Sunday, the attorney general’s office said the firing was unrelated to the Jan. 6 inquiry. In the first, to The Associated Press, Ms. LaCivita said that Mr. Heaphy had been a “controversial” hire and that the “decision was made after reviewing the legal decisions made over the last couple of years.”
“The attorney general wants the university counsel to return to giving legal advice based on law, and not the philosophy of a university,” she added.
In a subsequent statement, Ms. LaCivita said: “It is common practice for an incoming administration to appoint new staff that share the philosophical and legal approach of the attorney general. Every counsel serves at the pleasure of the attorney general.”
One top Virginia Republican said that Mr. Heaphy had angered some Republicans in the state by acting too independently in his job at the university and for his role in the university’s decision in 2020 to allow a student to post a highly critical sign about the school on their door. Mr. Heaphy had privately made the case to the school’s president that while the profanity on the sign was offensive, removing it would have infringed upon the student’s First Amendment rights.
On the House committee, Mr. Heaphy has worked behind the scenes, overseeing a staff of dozens of investigators who are examining how Mr. Trump and his allies sought to overturn the election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Mr. Heaphy is close to the committee’s vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, who has taken a highly aggressive approach to the inquiry.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/23/us/p ... w_arm_10_1
Democrats in Virginia denounced the action as a partisan move aimed at helping former President Donald J. Trump undercut the investigation of the Capitol riot.
By Michael S. Schmidt
Published Jan. 23, 2022
Updated Jan. 24, 2022, 7:06 a.m. ET
The top staff investigator on the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has been fired by the state’s new Republican attorney general from his position as the top lawyer for the University of Virginia, from which he was on leave while working on the congressional inquiry.
The office of the Virginia attorney general, Jason S. Miyares, said the firing of the investigator, Timothy J. Heaphy, was not related to the Jan. 6 investigation, but the move prompted an outcry from Democrats in the state, who accused him of taking the highly unusual action as a partisan move to further former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to undermine the committee’s work.
“This is purely payback for Jan. 6 — there is no other reason that makes any sense,” said Scott Surovell, a top Democrat in the Virginia State Senate, who said that he knew of no other similar example in recent history where a new attorney general had immediately removed a school’s top lawyer. “In our state, we normally leave those decisions to the school’s board of visitors and president.”
Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for Mr. Miyares, said: “The decision had nothing to do with the Jan. 6 committee or their investigations.”
In Virginia, the attorney general oversees a range of lawyers across the state, including the top lawyers at the colleges and universities that make up the vast public higher education system. The posts are typically held by career lawyers who are rarely replaced when new attorneys general take over.
In addition to dismissing Mr. Heaphy, Mr. Miyares also had the top lawyer at George Mason University removed.
Mr. Heaphy, a Democrat who has made political donations to Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr., had been the top lawyer at the University of Virginia since 2018. He served as a United States attorney in Virginia during the Obama administration and is married to the daughter of Eric K. Shinseki, the retired chief of staff of the Army who served as President Barack Obama’s secretary of veterans affairs. In 2017, on behalf of the City of Charlottesville, he completed a highly critical report of how the police handled the white nationalist rally that turned violent and led to the death of one woman and injured dozens.
In a written statement, the University of Virginia sidestepped the issue of whether his dismissal had been motivated by politics, but made clear that it had no role in it.
“University leaders are grateful to Tim for his outstanding service to our community and disappointed to see it come to an end,” said Brian Coy, a spokesman for the university. “If you have further questions about this matter, I would check with the attorney general’s office, as this was their decision to make.”
Mr. Heaphy — who attended undergraduate and law school at the University of Virginia, who has long lived in Charlottesville and whose son attends the school — declined to address why he was dismissed, saying that he was “disappointed” that his time at the university had come to an end and that he was confident that the school would continue “to thrive in the days to come.”
In two statements released on Sunday, the attorney general’s office said the firing was unrelated to the Jan. 6 inquiry. In the first, to The Associated Press, Ms. LaCivita said that Mr. Heaphy had been a “controversial” hire and that the “decision was made after reviewing the legal decisions made over the last couple of years.”
“The attorney general wants the university counsel to return to giving legal advice based on law, and not the philosophy of a university,” she added.
In a subsequent statement, Ms. LaCivita said: “It is common practice for an incoming administration to appoint new staff that share the philosophical and legal approach of the attorney general. Every counsel serves at the pleasure of the attorney general.”
One top Virginia Republican said that Mr. Heaphy had angered some Republicans in the state by acting too independently in his job at the university and for his role in the university’s decision in 2020 to allow a student to post a highly critical sign about the school on their door. Mr. Heaphy had privately made the case to the school’s president that while the profanity on the sign was offensive, removing it would have infringed upon the student’s First Amendment rights.
On the House committee, Mr. Heaphy has worked behind the scenes, overseeing a staff of dozens of investigators who are examining how Mr. Trump and his allies sought to overturn the election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Mr. Heaphy is close to the committee’s vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, who has taken a highly aggressive approach to the inquiry.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/23/us/p ... w_arm_10_1
Re: TrumpReich in action
Sieg Heil !
The GOP Virginia AG should be investigated as often the exercise of First Amendment rights is protected even if the employment is " at -will " , and one would also wonder whether an obstruction of Congress act , ie. another insurrection , has occurred.Bet this decision did nor occur in a vacuum.
The GOP Virginia AG should be investigated as often the exercise of First Amendment rights is protected even if the employment is " at -will " , and one would also wonder whether an obstruction of Congress act , ie. another insurrection , has occurred.Bet this decision did nor occur in a vacuum.
Re: TrumpReich in action
From Cedar Rapids Gazette today:
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (GOP) is asserting attorney-client privilege in keeping confidential records associated with an auction that she participated in to benefit a private, Christian school.
The records, requested by the Iowa Capital Dispatch in April 2021, pertain to an auction that was staged last year to benefit Des Moines Christian School. One of the items that was auctioned by the school was a dinner-for-eight package with the governor and her husband at their official residence, Terrace Hill. The winner of the auction was not named on the school’s website, but he or she appears to have placed a winning bid of $30,100 for the dinner.
Last spring, the governor asserted at a news conference that she had the legal authority to use the governor’s mansion in that fashion, but she did not elaborate, and her staff did not respond to several written requests for documentation related to that issue.
In December, the Capital Dispatch, along with the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and Bleeding Heartland, sued the governor’s office for failing to comply with the Iowa Open Records Law. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the plaintiffs by the ACLU of Iowa, pertains to 45 requests for public information.
The governor’s legal counsel, Michael Boal, recently informed the Capital Dispatch that any legal opinions about the auction and the use of Terrace Hill are being withheld from public disclosure due to what he called “the attorney-client work product privilege.”
(Rach3: Iowa GOP has recently passed laws benefiting private schools at the expense of pub.ci schools.The private schools are usually alt.Right or conservative or evangelical , or all of the above, academies.)
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (GOP) is asserting attorney-client privilege in keeping confidential records associated with an auction that she participated in to benefit a private, Christian school.
The records, requested by the Iowa Capital Dispatch in April 2021, pertain to an auction that was staged last year to benefit Des Moines Christian School. One of the items that was auctioned by the school was a dinner-for-eight package with the governor and her husband at their official residence, Terrace Hill. The winner of the auction was not named on the school’s website, but he or she appears to have placed a winning bid of $30,100 for the dinner.
Last spring, the governor asserted at a news conference that she had the legal authority to use the governor’s mansion in that fashion, but she did not elaborate, and her staff did not respond to several written requests for documentation related to that issue.
In December, the Capital Dispatch, along with the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and Bleeding Heartland, sued the governor’s office for failing to comply with the Iowa Open Records Law. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the plaintiffs by the ACLU of Iowa, pertains to 45 requests for public information.
The governor’s legal counsel, Michael Boal, recently informed the Capital Dispatch that any legal opinions about the auction and the use of Terrace Hill are being withheld from public disclosure due to what he called “the attorney-client work product privilege.”
(Rach3: Iowa GOP has recently passed laws benefiting private schools at the expense of pub.ci schools.The private schools are usually alt.Right or conservative or evangelical , or all of the above, academies.)
Re: TrumpReich in action
From media today:
Missouri expected to have 190K new Medicaid recipients by now. It has less than a third.
Rollout of the Medicaid expansion that voters approved in 2020 is ‘going much slower than anybody anticipated,’ advocates say. ( Rach3: The State GOP-controlled or GOP Governor rejected the Federal Medicaid expansion, but voters approved by a good margin the expansion on a special ballot initiative. The GOP is now obviously undermining.)
Missouri AG has sued 45 school districts with mask rules. What about charter schools?
All schools in the Kansas City limits are covered by a city ordinance requiring masks. But not all were sued by GOP Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt. ( Rach 3 : Schmitt is running for US Senate. )
----------------
This week, Tom Malinowski, a Democrat who represents New Jersey in the House, tweeted: “My office is now getting calls from folks who say they watch Tucker Carlson and are upset that we’re not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia’s ‘reasonable’ positions.”
-------------------
Virginia GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin has set up a special tip line for parents to report schools that are teaching their kids “divisive” critical race theory.The Republican touted a special new “Help Education” email address late Monday that he said will help enforce his first executive directive in office banning the controversial teaching method.
The tip line is “for parents to send us any instances where they feel their fundamental rights are being violated, where their children are not being respected [and] where there are inherently divisive practices in their schools,” Youngkin told radio host John Fredericks.“We’re asking for input from parents to make sure we can go right to the source,” he said.
Missouri expected to have 190K new Medicaid recipients by now. It has less than a third.
Rollout of the Medicaid expansion that voters approved in 2020 is ‘going much slower than anybody anticipated,’ advocates say. ( Rach3: The State GOP-controlled or GOP Governor rejected the Federal Medicaid expansion, but voters approved by a good margin the expansion on a special ballot initiative. The GOP is now obviously undermining.)
Missouri AG has sued 45 school districts with mask rules. What about charter schools?
All schools in the Kansas City limits are covered by a city ordinance requiring masks. But not all were sued by GOP Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt. ( Rach 3 : Schmitt is running for US Senate. )
----------------
This week, Tom Malinowski, a Democrat who represents New Jersey in the House, tweeted: “My office is now getting calls from folks who say they watch Tucker Carlson and are upset that we’re not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia’s ‘reasonable’ positions.”
-------------------
Virginia GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin has set up a special tip line for parents to report schools that are teaching their kids “divisive” critical race theory.The Republican touted a special new “Help Education” email address late Monday that he said will help enforce his first executive directive in office banning the controversial teaching method.
The tip line is “for parents to send us any instances where they feel their fundamental rights are being violated, where their children are not being respected [and] where there are inherently divisive practices in their schools,” Youngkin told radio host John Fredericks.“We’re asking for input from parents to make sure we can go right to the source,” he said.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Sieg heil!...Youngkin told radio host John Fredericks.“We’re asking for input from parents to make sure we can go right to the source,” he said.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Justice Dept. Is Reviewing Role of Fake Trump Electors, Top Official Says
Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, told CNN that she could not “say anything more on ongoing investigations.”
By Katie Benner
Jan. 25, 2022
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is investigating the fake slates of electors that falsely declared Donald J. Trump the victor of the 2020 election in seven swing states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had in fact won, a top agency official said on Tuesday.
“Our prosecutors are looking at those, and I can’t say anything more on ongoing investigations,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said in an interview with CNN.
The false certificates appear to have been part of an effort by Mr. Trump’s allies to reverse his defeat in the presidential election. Even as election officials in the seven contested states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed Mr. Trump was the winner in an apparent bid to subvert the election outcome.
Lawmakers, state officials and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot have asked the Justice Department to look into the role played by those fake electors and the documents they submitted to the National Archives on Dec. 14, 2020.
In some cases, top Republican Party officials in those seven states signed the false documents, according to copies posted online last March by American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.
“The phony electors were part of the plan to create chaos on Jan. 6, as a pretext for a contingent election,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee.
“The fake electoral slates were an effort to create the illusion of contested state results,” Mr. Raskin said. That, he added, would have given Mike Pence, who as vice president presided over Congress’s count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, “a pretext for unilateral rejection of electors.”
In Michigan, Dana Nessel, the attorney general, gave federal prosecutors information from her yearlong investigation into the matter. She has said that she believes there is enough evidence to charge 16 Republicans in her state with submitting the fake certificates and falsely claiming that they were official electors for the state.
And Hector Balderas Jr., the attorney general of New Mexico, and a local prosecutor in Wisconsin also asked the Justice Department to review the matter.
If investigators determine that Mr. Trump’s allies created the fake slates to improperly influence the election, they could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.
It is unclear whether the Republican Party officials and others who submitted the false documents did so on their own or at the behest of the Trump campaign.
“The people who pretended to be official electors in states that were won by Biden were undoubtedly guilty of fraud on the Constitution and on the democracy,” Mr. Raskin said. “It’s a trickier question whether they are guilty of either common-law fraud, state statutory fraud, federal mail fraud or some other offense.”
Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.
Katie Benner covers the Justice Department. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/us/p ... trump.html
Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, told CNN that she could not “say anything more on ongoing investigations.”
By Katie Benner
Jan. 25, 2022
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is investigating the fake slates of electors that falsely declared Donald J. Trump the victor of the 2020 election in seven swing states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had in fact won, a top agency official said on Tuesday.
“Our prosecutors are looking at those, and I can’t say anything more on ongoing investigations,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said in an interview with CNN.
The false certificates appear to have been part of an effort by Mr. Trump’s allies to reverse his defeat in the presidential election. Even as election officials in the seven contested states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed Mr. Trump was the winner in an apparent bid to subvert the election outcome.
Lawmakers, state officials and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot have asked the Justice Department to look into the role played by those fake electors and the documents they submitted to the National Archives on Dec. 14, 2020.
In some cases, top Republican Party officials in those seven states signed the false documents, according to copies posted online last March by American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.
“The phony electors were part of the plan to create chaos on Jan. 6, as a pretext for a contingent election,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee.
“The fake electoral slates were an effort to create the illusion of contested state results,” Mr. Raskin said. That, he added, would have given Mike Pence, who as vice president presided over Congress’s count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, “a pretext for unilateral rejection of electors.”
In Michigan, Dana Nessel, the attorney general, gave federal prosecutors information from her yearlong investigation into the matter. She has said that she believes there is enough evidence to charge 16 Republicans in her state with submitting the fake certificates and falsely claiming that they were official electors for the state.
And Hector Balderas Jr., the attorney general of New Mexico, and a local prosecutor in Wisconsin also asked the Justice Department to review the matter.
If investigators determine that Mr. Trump’s allies created the fake slates to improperly influence the election, they could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.
It is unclear whether the Republican Party officials and others who submitted the false documents did so on their own or at the behest of the Trump campaign.
“The people who pretended to be official electors in states that were won by Biden were undoubtedly guilty of fraud on the Constitution and on the democracy,” Mr. Raskin said. “It’s a trickier question whether they are guilty of either common-law fraud, state statutory fraud, federal mail fraud or some other offense.”
Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.
Katie Benner covers the Justice Department. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/us/p ... trump.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
From The WhyAxis today:
In Tennessee, a group of conservative parents tried to remove an autobiography of Ruby Bridges, the first black student to integrate a southern elementary school.
In Texas, a school administrator warned teachers they would have to include “opposing” views on the Holocaust in their classrooms.
In Iowa, school districts are purging books containing LGBTQ themes from their libraries.
These are just a handful of the tangible effects of a spate of educational gag orders passed by Republican lawmakers in at least 14 states over the past year. The laws and executive actions place restrictions on how teachers can discuss race, gender, sexual identity and American history in their classrooms.
As of this month, fully one-third of American public school students attend school under such a gag order, according to a Why Axis analysis of data tracked by Education Week.
More, and even stricter orders, are on the way: this January alone, 71 new bills have been introduced around the country, according to a tally by political scientist Jeffrey Sachs for the PEN America foundation.
The bills are often ostensibly targeted at “critical race theory,” until last year a fairly obscure niche in higher education that focused on the structural drivers of racist outcomes. Starting in late 2020, conservative activists latched on to the term in order to gain popular support for an ideological agenda targeting the public school system.
In practice, “critical race theory” has become completely divorced from its original definition and has come to mean “discussing topics in ways that conservatives disapprove of.” The activists behind this shift in meaning have not been subtle about their intentions. “We have successfully frozen their brand—'critical race theory'—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions,” said the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo last March. “We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”
Rufo and his far-right allies were aided in their mission by a national press that uncritically adopted their framing of the issue, writing as if “critical race theory” were a real topic with clear definitions that was actually being taught to public schoolchildren. “Political reporters are suckers for Republican scare stories,” as press watchdog Dan Froomkin wrote in October. “Reporters know ‘critical race theory’ isn’t a real issue. They know it’s euphemistic shorthand for all sorts of right-wing, often racist concerns about modest attempts to address diversity, equity and inclusion.” But many in the industry nevertheless spent much of 2021 passing on conservative activists’ allegations as fact.
The gag orders often place severe restrictions on teachers’ speech. A failed bill in Wisconsin, for instance, would have banned teachers from using words like “white supremacy,” “equity” and “cultural awareness” in their classrooms. Legislation introduced this month in Indiana would require teachers to instruct students that “socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are incompatible with and in conflict with the principles of freedom upon which the United States was founded.” Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin recently set up a tip line to encourage parents to report the teaching of “divisive concepts” — including “critical race theory and its progeny” — in students’ classrooms. A bill moving through the Florida legislature would ban elementary school teachers from “encourag[ing] classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity.”
It’s not surprising that schools have become a culture war battleground. Education is partly about instilling certain values into kids, and different people in different communities will have different ideas about which values should be taught. Those discussions have taken place for decades, largely under the national radar, in classrooms and at school board meetings across the country.
But the recent push for statewide educational gag orders is something else entirely. Republican lawmakers are granting their preferred values the force of law. They’re using the power of the state to police which topics can and can’t be discussed in classrooms. In previous years a community roiled by the inclusion of a certain book in a school library, or a certain speech in a local classroom, could hash out what to do about it amongst themselves. Parents, administrators, students and educators could chart their own path forward.
These gag orders explicitly take that choice away from these communities. The state will decide whether the 1619 project can be discussed in classrooms, or whether a teacher can say “woke,” or whether sixth graders can talk about what it means to be gay. That’s a huge loss for education — and if the bills filed in the past month are any indication, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In Tennessee, a group of conservative parents tried to remove an autobiography of Ruby Bridges, the first black student to integrate a southern elementary school.
In Texas, a school administrator warned teachers they would have to include “opposing” views on the Holocaust in their classrooms.
In Iowa, school districts are purging books containing LGBTQ themes from their libraries.
These are just a handful of the tangible effects of a spate of educational gag orders passed by Republican lawmakers in at least 14 states over the past year. The laws and executive actions place restrictions on how teachers can discuss race, gender, sexual identity and American history in their classrooms.
As of this month, fully one-third of American public school students attend school under such a gag order, according to a Why Axis analysis of data tracked by Education Week.
More, and even stricter orders, are on the way: this January alone, 71 new bills have been introduced around the country, according to a tally by political scientist Jeffrey Sachs for the PEN America foundation.
The bills are often ostensibly targeted at “critical race theory,” until last year a fairly obscure niche in higher education that focused on the structural drivers of racist outcomes. Starting in late 2020, conservative activists latched on to the term in order to gain popular support for an ideological agenda targeting the public school system.
In practice, “critical race theory” has become completely divorced from its original definition and has come to mean “discussing topics in ways that conservatives disapprove of.” The activists behind this shift in meaning have not been subtle about their intentions. “We have successfully frozen their brand—'critical race theory'—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions,” said the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo last March. “We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”
Rufo and his far-right allies were aided in their mission by a national press that uncritically adopted their framing of the issue, writing as if “critical race theory” were a real topic with clear definitions that was actually being taught to public schoolchildren. “Political reporters are suckers for Republican scare stories,” as press watchdog Dan Froomkin wrote in October. “Reporters know ‘critical race theory’ isn’t a real issue. They know it’s euphemistic shorthand for all sorts of right-wing, often racist concerns about modest attempts to address diversity, equity and inclusion.” But many in the industry nevertheless spent much of 2021 passing on conservative activists’ allegations as fact.
The gag orders often place severe restrictions on teachers’ speech. A failed bill in Wisconsin, for instance, would have banned teachers from using words like “white supremacy,” “equity” and “cultural awareness” in their classrooms. Legislation introduced this month in Indiana would require teachers to instruct students that “socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are incompatible with and in conflict with the principles of freedom upon which the United States was founded.” Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin recently set up a tip line to encourage parents to report the teaching of “divisive concepts” — including “critical race theory and its progeny” — in students’ classrooms. A bill moving through the Florida legislature would ban elementary school teachers from “encourag[ing] classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity.”
It’s not surprising that schools have become a culture war battleground. Education is partly about instilling certain values into kids, and different people in different communities will have different ideas about which values should be taught. Those discussions have taken place for decades, largely under the national radar, in classrooms and at school board meetings across the country.
But the recent push for statewide educational gag orders is something else entirely. Republican lawmakers are granting their preferred values the force of law. They’re using the power of the state to police which topics can and can’t be discussed in classrooms. In previous years a community roiled by the inclusion of a certain book in a school library, or a certain speech in a local classroom, could hash out what to do about it amongst themselves. Parents, administrators, students and educators could chart their own path forward.
These gag orders explicitly take that choice away from these communities. The state will decide whether the 1619 project can be discussed in classrooms, or whether a teacher can say “woke,” or whether sixth graders can talk about what it means to be gay. That’s a huge loss for education — and if the bills filed in the past month are any indication, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Fahrenheit 451 anyone?
Re: TrumpReich in action
Rach3 wrote: ↑Wed Jan 26, 2022 10:10 amFrom media today:
Missouri expected to have 190K new Medicaid recipients by now. It has less than a third.
Rollout of the Medicaid expansion that voters approved in 2020 is ‘going much slower than anybody anticipated,’ advocates say. ( Rach3: The State GOP-controlled or GOP Governor rejected the Federal Medicaid expansion, but voters approved by a good margin the expansion on a special ballot initiative. The GOP is now obviously undermining.)
Now the latest form Kansa City Star today:
KS GOP wants to block Medicaid changes until 2026. Critics say they’re risking $6 billion
“It could put us in an awkward position where we could neither comply with state law nor federal law,” Kansas’ Medicaid director told lawmakers.
Re: TrumpReich in action
From Kansas City Star today:
Some 200 Missouri, Kansas superintendents may quit amid COVID turmoil, hostile parents.
And fewer new candidates are willing to step into the inhospitable arena that public education has become.
From Cedar Rapids Gazette today :
A bill filed in the Iowa Senate this month would require teachers to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s a follow-up to a bipartisan measure passed last year requiring schools to offer the pledge in classrooms each day but stopping short of mandating anyone to read it.
Under the legislation — introduced by State Sen. Adrian Dickey, R-Packwood — a teacher also could not “speak about the Pledge of Allegiance” in a way students could perceive as “an unpatriotic commentary.”....
Since students are protected by court decisions from having to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, lawmakers think they have the next best thing, pinning teachers with the responsibility to model blind loyalty to the government. It’s a futile exercise in fake patriotism.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Sieg heil!Rach3 wrote: ↑Fri Jan 28, 2022 9:14 amFrom Kansas City Star today:
Some 200 Missouri, Kansas superintendents may quit amid COVID turmoil, hostile parents.
And fewer new candidates are willing to step into the inhospitable arena that public education has become.
From Cedar Rapids Gazette today :
A bill filed in the Iowa Senate this month would require teachers to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s a follow-up to a bipartisan measure passed last year requiring schools to offer the pledge in classrooms each day but stopping short of mandating anyone to read it.
Under the legislation — introduced by State Sen. Adrian Dickey, R-Packwood — a teacher also could not “speak about the Pledge of Allegiance” in a way students could perceive as “an unpatriotic commentary.”....
Since students are protected by court decisions from having to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, lawmakers think they have the next best thing, pinning teachers with the responsibility to model blind loyalty to the government. It’s a futile exercise in fake patriotism.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Texas GOP now openly attacking, threatening one of the State's Appeals Courts:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/texas-republ ... 27252.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/texas-republ ... 27252.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
Atlanta Black Star
Congresswoman Cori Bush’s Car Shot Up In St. Louis, Blue Lives Matter Spokesman Has ‘Vile’ Response: ‘We Need the Lawmakers to be Victims’
Nicole Duncan-Smith
Sat, January 29, 2022, 9:06 PM
Missouri’s first Black congresswoman’s car was littered with bullets last weekend while it was parked in St. Louis. Despite sources believing she was not the intended target of the gunplay, the politician continues to receive a great outpouring of support from the community.
NBC News states while U.S. House Rep. Cori Bush was not in the car when it was shot up, nor was she injured, but she is still shaken.
“Like far too many of us in St. Louis, experiencing gun violence is all too familiar,” Bush said in a statement released on Twitter. “Thankfully no one was harmed. But any act of gun violence shakes your soul.”
The progressive steered the conversation from herself and drew attention to a much larger issue.
“No one should have to fear for their safety here in St. Louis, and that is exactly why our movement is working every day to invest in our communities, eradicate the root causes of gun violence, and keep every neighborhood safe,” she continued.
A source close to her says that it is believed the shooting, allegedly on the morning of Jan. 22, was not intended for the congresswoman but the incident is disturbing. The representative also says that there was evidence that other vehicles were tampered with over the weekend in the same area of the shooting.
One guest on Fox News described the incident as what he claimed is natural consequence of the defund the police position he claims is held by Democrats. New York Police Sgt. Joseph Imperatrice, founder of Blue Lives Matter NYC, told the anchor last week, “The harsh truth is we need the lawmakers to be victims.”
Congresswoman Cori Bush’s Car Shot Up In St. Louis, Blue Lives Matter Spokesman Has ‘Vile’ Response: ‘We Need the Lawmakers to be Victims’
Nicole Duncan-Smith
Sat, January 29, 2022, 9:06 PM
Missouri’s first Black congresswoman’s car was littered with bullets last weekend while it was parked in St. Louis. Despite sources believing she was not the intended target of the gunplay, the politician continues to receive a great outpouring of support from the community.
NBC News states while U.S. House Rep. Cori Bush was not in the car when it was shot up, nor was she injured, but she is still shaken.
“Like far too many of us in St. Louis, experiencing gun violence is all too familiar,” Bush said in a statement released on Twitter. “Thankfully no one was harmed. But any act of gun violence shakes your soul.”
The progressive steered the conversation from herself and drew attention to a much larger issue.
“No one should have to fear for their safety here in St. Louis, and that is exactly why our movement is working every day to invest in our communities, eradicate the root causes of gun violence, and keep every neighborhood safe,” she continued.
A source close to her says that it is believed the shooting, allegedly on the morning of Jan. 22, was not intended for the congresswoman but the incident is disturbing. The representative also says that there was evidence that other vehicles were tampered with over the weekend in the same area of the shooting.
One guest on Fox News described the incident as what he claimed is natural consequence of the defund the police position he claims is held by Democrats. New York Police Sgt. Joseph Imperatrice, founder of Blue Lives Matter NYC, told the anchor last week, “The harsh truth is we need the lawmakers to be victims.”
Re: TrumpReich in action
This is beyond reprehensible. Horrifying thought.New York Police Sgt. Joseph Imperatrice, founder of Blue Lives Matter NYC, told the anchor last week, “The harsh truth is we need the lawmakers to be victims.”
Re: TrumpReich in action
Steve Bannon strikes again. Of course we all know that the "movement" has gone international by now.
Never forget.
Re: TrumpReich in action
From NYT today:
• Donald Trump was more directly involved than known in exploring proposals to have national security agencies seize voting machines, accounts show.
• Trump’s political operation reported having $122 million in the bank, more than double the cash on hand of the Republican National Committee.
DOJ needs to hurry.
• Donald Trump was more directly involved than known in exploring proposals to have national security agencies seize voting machines, accounts show.
• Trump’s political operation reported having $122 million in the bank, more than double the cash on hand of the Republican National Committee.
DOJ needs to hurry.
Re: TrumpReich in action
From WAPO today :
When Garrett Soldano was asked on a right-wing podcast how he would “ensure the sanctity of life” in Michigan, the Republican candidate for governor said he would stop at nothing to protect a fetus.
Even in cases where victims of rape become pregnant, Soldano said, “we’re always going to fight for life.”
“They don’t know that little baby inside them may be the next president, may be the next person who changes humanity,” Soldano said on the “Face the Facts” podcast.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... -governor/
Republican candidates for governor and the state Senate in Michigan are drawing scrutiny for suggesting that poll workers unplug voting machines if they suspect fraud and that people should “show up armed” to protect GOP election observers’ access to ballot counting.
The comments by Ryan D. Kelley, a gubernatorial candidate, and Mike Detmer, a state Senate candidate, were made at an event over the weekend in Livingston County, Mich., and captured on video that has since circulated widely on social media.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ng-places/
When Garrett Soldano was asked on a right-wing podcast how he would “ensure the sanctity of life” in Michigan, the Republican candidate for governor said he would stop at nothing to protect a fetus.
Even in cases where victims of rape become pregnant, Soldano said, “we’re always going to fight for life.”
“They don’t know that little baby inside them may be the next president, may be the next person who changes humanity,” Soldano said on the “Face the Facts” podcast.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... -governor/
Republican candidates for governor and the state Senate in Michigan are drawing scrutiny for suggesting that poll workers unplug voting machines if they suspect fraud and that people should “show up armed” to protect GOP election observers’ access to ballot counting.
The comments by Ryan D. Kelley, a gubernatorial candidate, and Mike Detmer, a state Senate candidate, were made at an event over the weekend in Livingston County, Mich., and captured on video that has since circulated widely on social media.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ng-places/
Re: TrumpReich in action
Kansas City Star tonight:
" Kansas lawmakers seek to defund inquiries of board probing senator who touts unproven COVID treatments. The proposal to stop funding some investigations comes after Sen. Mark Steffen said the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts is scrutinizing him."
Sieg heil !
" Kansas lawmakers seek to defund inquiries of board probing senator who touts unproven COVID treatments. The proposal to stop funding some investigations comes after Sen. Mark Steffen said the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts is scrutinizing him."
Sieg heil !
Re: TrumpReich in action
From NYT Op Ed Michelle Goldberg today ( in part ):
There’s recently been an explosion of censorship in conservative parts of the country, including prohibitions on the teaching of critical race theory and an orgy of school library book bans. So far, this censorship has mostly, though not exclusively, targeted K-12 schools. But that’s changing. As PEN America, a free speech organization, recently reported, “In 2022, educational gag orders are being aimed squarely at colleges and universities to exert ideological control over what is being taught and read in classrooms and lecture halls.” Those who hope to counter this wave will need to appeal to broad standards of academic freedom. Any erosion of those standards is likely to redound against the left.
The audacity of some recent red state proposals is stunning. A new bill in Oklahoma forbids teaching that “one race is the unique oppressor in the institution of slavery” and that “another race is the unique victim in the institution of slavery.” It would apply to school districts and charter schools, as well as any type of state-funded online education or personnel of any “state agency.” According to Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, this wording encompasses higher education. “Public universities, public colleges, are state agencies,” he said.
A South Carolina proposal would, among other things, prohibit an instructor in any “state-funded entity” from teaching in a way that “advertises or promotes ideologies or sociopolitical causes or organizations.” The bill would create a hotline for people to report violations, similar to the one that Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia has pioneered for K-12 schools.
“There were all kinds of bills last year that implicated colleges,” said Friedman. “What’s different here is the specificity and the Wild West nature of what is being proposed. You can just propose anything be banned in colleges in your state right now.”
There’s recently been an explosion of censorship in conservative parts of the country, including prohibitions on the teaching of critical race theory and an orgy of school library book bans. So far, this censorship has mostly, though not exclusively, targeted K-12 schools. But that’s changing. As PEN America, a free speech organization, recently reported, “In 2022, educational gag orders are being aimed squarely at colleges and universities to exert ideological control over what is being taught and read in classrooms and lecture halls.” Those who hope to counter this wave will need to appeal to broad standards of academic freedom. Any erosion of those standards is likely to redound against the left.
The audacity of some recent red state proposals is stunning. A new bill in Oklahoma forbids teaching that “one race is the unique oppressor in the institution of slavery” and that “another race is the unique victim in the institution of slavery.” It would apply to school districts and charter schools, as well as any type of state-funded online education or personnel of any “state agency.” According to Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, this wording encompasses higher education. “Public universities, public colleges, are state agencies,” he said.
A South Carolina proposal would, among other things, prohibit an instructor in any “state-funded entity” from teaching in a way that “advertises or promotes ideologies or sociopolitical causes or organizations.” The bill would create a hotline for people to report violations, similar to the one that Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia has pioneered for K-12 schools.
“There were all kinds of bills last year that implicated colleges,” said Friedman. “What’s different here is the specificity and the Wild West nature of what is being proposed. You can just propose anything be banned in colleges in your state right now.”
Re: TrumpReich in action
NYT today:
" G.O.P. Declares Jan. 6 Attack ‘Legitimate Political Discourse
The Republican National Committee voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the inquiry into the deadly riot at the Capitol.
Representative Liz Cheney has said Republican leaders “have made themselves willing hostages” to former President Donald J. Trump.
By Jonathan Weisman and Reid J. Epstein
Published Feb. 4, 2022
Updated Feb. 5, 2022, 12:04 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it.
The Republican National Committee’s voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City culminated more than a year of vacillation, which started with party leaders condemning the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s conduct, then shifted to downplaying and denying it.
On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
After the vote, party leaders rushed to clarify that language, saying it was never meant to apply to rioters who violently stormed the Capitol in Mr. Trump’s name."
(Rach3: The GOP is now officially a criminal party. Your GOP friends should be ashamed.)
" G.O.P. Declares Jan. 6 Attack ‘Legitimate Political Discourse
The Republican National Committee voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the inquiry into the deadly riot at the Capitol.
Representative Liz Cheney has said Republican leaders “have made themselves willing hostages” to former President Donald J. Trump.
By Jonathan Weisman and Reid J. Epstein
Published Feb. 4, 2022
Updated Feb. 5, 2022, 12:04 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it.
The Republican National Committee’s voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City culminated more than a year of vacillation, which started with party leaders condemning the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s conduct, then shifted to downplaying and denying it.
On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
After the vote, party leaders rushed to clarify that language, saying it was never meant to apply to rioters who violently stormed the Capitol in Mr. Trump’s name."
(Rach3: The GOP is now officially a criminal party. Your GOP friends should be ashamed.)
Re: TrumpReich in action
Not even butterflies are safe from the Right:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/national-but ... 01502.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/national-but ... 01502.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
They are just unbelievably slimy, aren't they, the GOP? Of course they meant precisely the rioters - who else is being "persecuted"? The GOP is a festering sore poisoning US political discourse, and it's a sign of real sickness in the US that 70 million voted for a poisonous now-former President. Of course that sickness is found in many countries, including mine, but it is so advanced that it may be terminal in the US.
Re: TrumpReich in action
NYT today ; AG Garland needs to get busy:
Days before the first phase of Washington’s vaccination entry requirement went into effect on Jan. 15, The Big Board, a family-owned bar in the popular H Street Corridor, tweeted that it would “always” be open to everyone.
The Big Board’s owners kept their promise, at a high cost. This week, the bar, a mile from the U.S. Capitol, was shut down after refusing to abide by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s order to check that patrons over the age of 12 had at least one dose of a Covid vaccine.
But the bar already seems to have another life, at least in conservative circles.
After a city health inspector posted a closure notice on The Big Board’s door on Tuesday saying that the bar “presents an imminent health hazard to the public,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, dined at the bar with staffers, according to The Washington Examiner and The Daily Caller, two conservative news outlets. But since then, the bar has remained closed to the public.
Mr. Paul has introduced a bill before Congress to overturn Washington’s vaccination requirements. He also previously claimed that “masks don’t work,” despite the consensus among public health officials that they do limit the spread of the virus. A California study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week also showed that consistent use of high-quality masks offers strong protection to wearers.
The Examiner and The Daily Caller reported that several other Republican members of the House joined Mr. Paul on Tuesday night, all of whom have also publicly criticized vaccine mandates, including Representatives Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, and Ronny Jackson, Republican of Texas. Grinning and maskless, some of the lawmakers posed for pictures with a co-owner of the bar, Eric Flannery.
In a YouTube video made that evening, Mr. Flannery, with some of the congressional representatives standing next to him, vowed to “keep on fighting” and said the mayor’s order needed to be challenged in D.C. Superior Court.
Mr. Massie then saluted Mr. Flannery’s defiance. “If the mandate is illogical, the only logical thing to do is to defy it,” Mr. Massie said. “If the mandate is unconstitutional, it is constitutional not to follow it. If the mandate is unscientific, the only scientific thing to do is to ignore it. And so God bless you and thank you for being in the fight.”
And Representative Tim Burchett invited Mr. Flannery to relocate. “If you want to come to Tennessee, we’re a freedom-loving state, and we’d love to have you, brother,” he said.
On Thursday, Glenn Beck, the unvaccinated conservative radio host who has previously been criticized for spreading misinformation about Covid vaccines, also interviewed Mr. Flannery and promoted the bar, directing listeners to a fund-raising campaign on GiveSendGo, a self-described Christian crowdfunding site. Another conservative talk radio show, The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, which took over the time slot previously filled by right-wing talk radio star Rush Limbaugh, interviewed Mr. Flannery on Thursday and linked to the crowdfunding site. By Saturday afternoon, that site had logged more than $16,500 in donations.
The state of the virus in the U.S. The coronavirus has now claimed more than 900,000 lives across the country, and the Covid death rates remain alarmingly high. The number of new infections, however, has fallen by more than half since mid-January, and hospitalizations are also declining.
And an earlier GoFundMe campaign for The Big Board’s owners set up by a correspondent with the Daily Caller on Jan. 19 and tweeted by Mr. Paul had logged more than $32,700 in donations by Saturday afternoon.
Mr. Flannery and The Big Board did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In December, when Mayor Bowser announced that the vaccination entry requirement would be put into place, Washington was experiencing surging rates of positive Covid tests as the Omicron variant became dominant.
Covid deaths in the district have risen only slightly in the aftermath, likely because more than 92 percent of the population has had at least one dose of the vaccine.
Days before the first phase of Washington’s vaccination entry requirement went into effect on Jan. 15, The Big Board, a family-owned bar in the popular H Street Corridor, tweeted that it would “always” be open to everyone.
The Big Board’s owners kept their promise, at a high cost. This week, the bar, a mile from the U.S. Capitol, was shut down after refusing to abide by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s order to check that patrons over the age of 12 had at least one dose of a Covid vaccine.
But the bar already seems to have another life, at least in conservative circles.
After a city health inspector posted a closure notice on The Big Board’s door on Tuesday saying that the bar “presents an imminent health hazard to the public,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, dined at the bar with staffers, according to The Washington Examiner and The Daily Caller, two conservative news outlets. But since then, the bar has remained closed to the public.
Mr. Paul has introduced a bill before Congress to overturn Washington’s vaccination requirements. He also previously claimed that “masks don’t work,” despite the consensus among public health officials that they do limit the spread of the virus. A California study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week also showed that consistent use of high-quality masks offers strong protection to wearers.
The Examiner and The Daily Caller reported that several other Republican members of the House joined Mr. Paul on Tuesday night, all of whom have also publicly criticized vaccine mandates, including Representatives Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, and Ronny Jackson, Republican of Texas. Grinning and maskless, some of the lawmakers posed for pictures with a co-owner of the bar, Eric Flannery.
In a YouTube video made that evening, Mr. Flannery, with some of the congressional representatives standing next to him, vowed to “keep on fighting” and said the mayor’s order needed to be challenged in D.C. Superior Court.
Mr. Massie then saluted Mr. Flannery’s defiance. “If the mandate is illogical, the only logical thing to do is to defy it,” Mr. Massie said. “If the mandate is unconstitutional, it is constitutional not to follow it. If the mandate is unscientific, the only scientific thing to do is to ignore it. And so God bless you and thank you for being in the fight.”
And Representative Tim Burchett invited Mr. Flannery to relocate. “If you want to come to Tennessee, we’re a freedom-loving state, and we’d love to have you, brother,” he said.
On Thursday, Glenn Beck, the unvaccinated conservative radio host who has previously been criticized for spreading misinformation about Covid vaccines, also interviewed Mr. Flannery and promoted the bar, directing listeners to a fund-raising campaign on GiveSendGo, a self-described Christian crowdfunding site. Another conservative talk radio show, The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, which took over the time slot previously filled by right-wing talk radio star Rush Limbaugh, interviewed Mr. Flannery on Thursday and linked to the crowdfunding site. By Saturday afternoon, that site had logged more than $16,500 in donations.
The state of the virus in the U.S. The coronavirus has now claimed more than 900,000 lives across the country, and the Covid death rates remain alarmingly high. The number of new infections, however, has fallen by more than half since mid-January, and hospitalizations are also declining.
And an earlier GoFundMe campaign for The Big Board’s owners set up by a correspondent with the Daily Caller on Jan. 19 and tweeted by Mr. Paul had logged more than $32,700 in donations by Saturday afternoon.
Mr. Flannery and The Big Board did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In December, when Mayor Bowser announced that the vaccination entry requirement would be put into place, Washington was experiencing surging rates of positive Covid tests as the Omicron variant became dominant.
Covid deaths in the district have risen only slightly in the aftermath, likely because more than 92 percent of the population has had at least one dose of the vaccine.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Rand Paul is a bizarre opportunist, worse than his eccentric father.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Republicans, Wooing Trump Voters, Make Fauci Their Boogeyman
G.O.P. candidates, tapping into voters’ frustrations with a seemingly endless pandemic, are stepping up their attacks on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Feb. 7, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
COLUMBUS, Ohio — When Jane Timken kicked off an eight-week advertising campaign on the Fox News Channel in her bid for the Republican nomination for Senate, she did not focus on immigration, health care or the economy. Her first ad was titled “Fire Fauci.”
Her target — Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s top medical adviser for the coronavirus — is also under attack in Pennsylvania, where Mehmet Oz, a television doctor who has entered the Republican Senate primary there, calls him a “petty tyrant.” Dr. Oz recently ran a Twitter ad calling for a debate — not between candidates, but between him and Dr. Fauci.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis released an advertisement last month telling Dr. Fauci to “pound sand” via the beach sandals the governor’s re-election campaign is now selling: “Freedom Over Fauci Flip-Flops.” In Wisconsin, Kevin Nicholson, a onetime Democrat running for governor as a conservative outsider, says Dr. Fauci “should be fired and referred to prosecutors.”
Republican attacks on Dr. Fauci are not new; former President Donald J. Trump, irked that the doctor publicly corrected his falsehoods about the virus, called him “a disaster” and repeatedly threatened to fire him. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, has grilled Dr. Fauci in nationally televised hearings, and Dr. Fauci — true to his fighter-from-Brooklyn roots — has punched back.
But as the 2022 midterm elections approach, the attacks have spread across the nation, intensifying as Dr. Fauci draws outsize attention in some of the most important state and local races on the ballot in November.
The Republican war on Dr. Fauci is partly a sign of Mr. Trump’s strong grip on the party. But Dr. Fauci, both his friends and detractors agree, has also become a symbol of something deeper — the deep schism in the country, mistrust in government and a brewing populist resentment of the elites, all made worse by the pandemic.
And Dr. Fauci, whose perpetual television appearances have made him the face of the Covid-19 response — and who is viewed by his critics as a high-and-mighty know-it-all who enjoys his celebrity — seems an obvious person to blame.
“Populism is essentially anti: anti-establishment, anti-expertise, anti-intellectual and anti-media,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, adding that Dr. Fauci “is an establishment expert intellectual who is in the media.”
For the 81-year-old immunologist, a venerated figure in the world of science, it is a jarring last chapter of a government career that has spanned half a century. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a post he has held since 1984, he has helped lead the response to various public health crises, including AIDS and Ebola, and advised eight presidents. He has never revealed a party affiliation. President George H.W. Bush once cited him as a hero.
Now, though, some voters are parroting right-wing commentators who compare Dr. Fauci to the brutal Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Candidates in hotly contested Republican primaries like Ohio’s are trying to out-Trump one another by supplanting Speaker Nancy Pelosi with Dr. Fauci as a political boogeyman. Mr. DeSantis has coined a new term: “Faucism.” In Washington, lawmakers are taking aim at Dr. Fauci’s salary, finances and influence.
“I didn’t make myself a polarizing figure,” Dr. Fauci declared in an interview. “I’ve been demonized by people who are running away from the truth.”
The anti-Fauci fervor has taken its toll on his personal life; he has received death threats, his family has been harassed and his home in Washington is guarded by a security detail. His standing with the public has also suffered. In a recent NBC News Poll, just 40 percent of respondents said they trusted Dr. Fauci, down from 60 percent in April 2020.
Still, Mr. Ayres said, Dr. Fauci remains for many Americans “one of the most trusted voices regarding the pandemic.” In a Gallup poll at the end of 2021, his job approval rating was 52 percent. On a list of 10 officials, including Mr. Biden and congressional leaders, only two scored higher: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Republican strategists are split on whether attacking Dr. Fauci is a smart strategy. Mr. Ayres said it could help rev up the base in a primary but backfire in a general election, especially in a swing state like Ohio. But John Feehery, another strategist, said many pandemic-weary Americans viewed Dr. Fauci as “Mr. Lockdown,” and it made sense for Republicans “to run against both Fauci and lockdowns.”
Here in Ohio, Ms. Timken, a Harvard graduate and former chairwoman of the Ohio Republican Party who promises to “advance the Trump agenda without fear or hesitation,” is doing just that. Her ad shows a parent struggling to put a mask on a screaming toddler, which she brands “child abuse.”
The spot, she said in an interview, was prompted by what she hears from voters who are resentful of vaccine mandates, confused by shifting public health advice and tired of being told what to do.
“It taps into the real frustration they feel,” Ms. Timken said, “that Fauci claims to be the bastion of science, but I think he’s playing God.”
She is one of three candidates with elite academic credentials who are going after Dr. Fauci in a crowded primary for the seat that Senator Rob Portman, a Republican, is giving up. The others are J.D. Vance, a lawyer with a Yale degree and the author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” and Josh Mandel, the former Ohio state treasurer, whose law degree is from Case Western Reserve University.
Mr. Vance called Dr. Fauci “a ridiculous tyrant” during a rally with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican banned from Twitter for spreading Covid misinformation. Mr. Mandel has railed against Dr. Fauci for months on Facebook and Twitter, calling him a liar and “one of the biggest frauds in American history.”
Ohio Republicans are split between the Trump wing and centrists in the mold of John Kasich, the former governor. Those tensions were on display last week at Tommy’s Diner, a Columbus institution, and at a meeting of the Franklin County Republican Committee, which convened to vote on endorsements. Sentiments seemed to track with vaccination status.
At the diner, Republicans like Mike Matthews, a retired state worker, and George Wolf, a retired firefighter, both of whom voted for Mr. Trump, found no fault with Dr. Fauci. Both are vaccinated. “I’ve never heard of anyone that I would trust more,” Mr. Wolf said.
But at the next table, Andy Watkinson, a remodeling contractor who is unvaccinated, said he was a fan of Joe Rogan, the podcaster, provocateur and Fauci critic. “I think he’s done the same thing for 50 years and he’s in bed with all the pharma companies,” Mr. Watkinson said of Dr. Fauci, though there is no evidence of that. “He needs to retire.”
At the committee meeting, views about Dr. Fauci were more strident.
“He needs to be brought up on charges,” declared Lisadiana Bates, a former business owner who is home-schooling her children. Echoing Dr. Robert Malone, who has become a conservative celebrity by arguing that Covid vaccine mandates are unethical experiments, she asserted that Dr. Fauci had “violated the Nuremberg Code,” the set of research ethics developed after the Holocaust.
“This whole thing is nothing but an experiment!” Ms. Bates exclaimed.
The roots of anti-Fauci campaign rhetoric can be traced to Washington, where Dr. Fauci has clashed repeatedly with two Republican senators who are also doctors: Mr. Paul, an ophthalmologist, and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, an obstetrician.
Mr. Paul has fueled speculation that Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak produced by federally funded “gain-of-function” research — high-risk studies aimed at making viruses more infectious — in Wuhan, China. Dr. Fauci and other National Institutes of Health officials have said that the Wuhan research did not meet the criteria for gain-of-function studies, and that it is genetically impossible for viruses studied there to have produced the pandemic.
The nuances of that dispute, however, have gotten lost in the increasingly hostile exchanges between the two men. In July, after Mr. Paul accused him of lying to Congress, Dr. Fauci shot back, “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.” Last month, Dr. Fauci arrived at a Senate hearing brandishing a fund-raising webpage for Mr. Paul that included a “Fire Dr. Fauci” graphic, and accused Mr. Paul of exploiting the pandemic for political gain.
Later in that same hearing, Dr. Fauci muttered under his breath that Mr. Marshall was “a moron” — a comment caught on an open microphone — after the senator posted Dr. Fauci’s salary on a placard and demanded his financial disclosure forms, suggesting he might be engaged in financial “shenanigans” with the pharmaceutical industry.
(Dr. Fauci’s financial disclosure forms, which Mr. Marshall has since posted on the internet, show investments in bonds and mutual funds, not drug companies. He is paid an annual salary of $434,312 under a provision that allows government doctors and scientists to be highly compensated, akin to what they could earn in the private sector.)
Dr. Fauci said he did not regret the “moron” remark, or the pushback against Mr. Paul. But Ms. Timken said calling Mr. Marshall a moron was “beyond the pale.”
Even some Fauci fans in academia and government say he might have been better off keeping his cool to avoid amplifying his Republican critics and alienating voters who need to hear his public health message. Some suggest he lower his profile; he says the White House asks him to go on TV.
“He’s been pushing back in a way that is not common for us to see for American scientists, and I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
If Democrats lose seats in the midterm elections, as many expect, Dr. Fauci may have a Republican-controlled Congress to contend with. Another Republican from Ohio, Representative Jim Jordan, who claims that Dr. Fauci knew the coronavirus “came from a lab,” has vowed that Republicans will investigate him if they win control of the House.
Some of Dr. Fauci’s friends are urging him to avoid that possibility by retiring. He has been working on a memoir, but cannot look for a publisher while he is still a federal employee. Dr. Fauci says Republicans will not dictate the terms of his retirement, and he has no plans at the moment to step down. And, he said, he is not worried about any investigation.
“I can’t think of what they would want to investigate except this whole pile of lies that they’re throwing around,” he said.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg is a Washington Correspondent covering health policy. In more than two decades at The Times, she has also covered the White House, Congress and national politics. Previously, at The Los Angeles Times, she shared in two Pulitzer Prizes won by that newspaper’s Metro staff.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/us/p ... pe=Article
G.O.P. candidates, tapping into voters’ frustrations with a seemingly endless pandemic, are stepping up their attacks on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Feb. 7, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
COLUMBUS, Ohio — When Jane Timken kicked off an eight-week advertising campaign on the Fox News Channel in her bid for the Republican nomination for Senate, she did not focus on immigration, health care or the economy. Her first ad was titled “Fire Fauci.”
Her target — Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s top medical adviser for the coronavirus — is also under attack in Pennsylvania, where Mehmet Oz, a television doctor who has entered the Republican Senate primary there, calls him a “petty tyrant.” Dr. Oz recently ran a Twitter ad calling for a debate — not between candidates, but between him and Dr. Fauci.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis released an advertisement last month telling Dr. Fauci to “pound sand” via the beach sandals the governor’s re-election campaign is now selling: “Freedom Over Fauci Flip-Flops.” In Wisconsin, Kevin Nicholson, a onetime Democrat running for governor as a conservative outsider, says Dr. Fauci “should be fired and referred to prosecutors.”
Republican attacks on Dr. Fauci are not new; former President Donald J. Trump, irked that the doctor publicly corrected his falsehoods about the virus, called him “a disaster” and repeatedly threatened to fire him. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, has grilled Dr. Fauci in nationally televised hearings, and Dr. Fauci — true to his fighter-from-Brooklyn roots — has punched back.
But as the 2022 midterm elections approach, the attacks have spread across the nation, intensifying as Dr. Fauci draws outsize attention in some of the most important state and local races on the ballot in November.
The Republican war on Dr. Fauci is partly a sign of Mr. Trump’s strong grip on the party. But Dr. Fauci, both his friends and detractors agree, has also become a symbol of something deeper — the deep schism in the country, mistrust in government and a brewing populist resentment of the elites, all made worse by the pandemic.
And Dr. Fauci, whose perpetual television appearances have made him the face of the Covid-19 response — and who is viewed by his critics as a high-and-mighty know-it-all who enjoys his celebrity — seems an obvious person to blame.
“Populism is essentially anti: anti-establishment, anti-expertise, anti-intellectual and anti-media,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, adding that Dr. Fauci “is an establishment expert intellectual who is in the media.”
For the 81-year-old immunologist, a venerated figure in the world of science, it is a jarring last chapter of a government career that has spanned half a century. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a post he has held since 1984, he has helped lead the response to various public health crises, including AIDS and Ebola, and advised eight presidents. He has never revealed a party affiliation. President George H.W. Bush once cited him as a hero.
Now, though, some voters are parroting right-wing commentators who compare Dr. Fauci to the brutal Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Candidates in hotly contested Republican primaries like Ohio’s are trying to out-Trump one another by supplanting Speaker Nancy Pelosi with Dr. Fauci as a political boogeyman. Mr. DeSantis has coined a new term: “Faucism.” In Washington, lawmakers are taking aim at Dr. Fauci’s salary, finances and influence.
“I didn’t make myself a polarizing figure,” Dr. Fauci declared in an interview. “I’ve been demonized by people who are running away from the truth.”
The anti-Fauci fervor has taken its toll on his personal life; he has received death threats, his family has been harassed and his home in Washington is guarded by a security detail. His standing with the public has also suffered. In a recent NBC News Poll, just 40 percent of respondents said they trusted Dr. Fauci, down from 60 percent in April 2020.
Still, Mr. Ayres said, Dr. Fauci remains for many Americans “one of the most trusted voices regarding the pandemic.” In a Gallup poll at the end of 2021, his job approval rating was 52 percent. On a list of 10 officials, including Mr. Biden and congressional leaders, only two scored higher: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Republican strategists are split on whether attacking Dr. Fauci is a smart strategy. Mr. Ayres said it could help rev up the base in a primary but backfire in a general election, especially in a swing state like Ohio. But John Feehery, another strategist, said many pandemic-weary Americans viewed Dr. Fauci as “Mr. Lockdown,” and it made sense for Republicans “to run against both Fauci and lockdowns.”
Here in Ohio, Ms. Timken, a Harvard graduate and former chairwoman of the Ohio Republican Party who promises to “advance the Trump agenda without fear or hesitation,” is doing just that. Her ad shows a parent struggling to put a mask on a screaming toddler, which she brands “child abuse.”
The spot, she said in an interview, was prompted by what she hears from voters who are resentful of vaccine mandates, confused by shifting public health advice and tired of being told what to do.
“It taps into the real frustration they feel,” Ms. Timken said, “that Fauci claims to be the bastion of science, but I think he’s playing God.”
She is one of three candidates with elite academic credentials who are going after Dr. Fauci in a crowded primary for the seat that Senator Rob Portman, a Republican, is giving up. The others are J.D. Vance, a lawyer with a Yale degree and the author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” and Josh Mandel, the former Ohio state treasurer, whose law degree is from Case Western Reserve University.
Mr. Vance called Dr. Fauci “a ridiculous tyrant” during a rally with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican banned from Twitter for spreading Covid misinformation. Mr. Mandel has railed against Dr. Fauci for months on Facebook and Twitter, calling him a liar and “one of the biggest frauds in American history.”
Ohio Republicans are split between the Trump wing and centrists in the mold of John Kasich, the former governor. Those tensions were on display last week at Tommy’s Diner, a Columbus institution, and at a meeting of the Franklin County Republican Committee, which convened to vote on endorsements. Sentiments seemed to track with vaccination status.
At the diner, Republicans like Mike Matthews, a retired state worker, and George Wolf, a retired firefighter, both of whom voted for Mr. Trump, found no fault with Dr. Fauci. Both are vaccinated. “I’ve never heard of anyone that I would trust more,” Mr. Wolf said.
But at the next table, Andy Watkinson, a remodeling contractor who is unvaccinated, said he was a fan of Joe Rogan, the podcaster, provocateur and Fauci critic. “I think he’s done the same thing for 50 years and he’s in bed with all the pharma companies,” Mr. Watkinson said of Dr. Fauci, though there is no evidence of that. “He needs to retire.”
At the committee meeting, views about Dr. Fauci were more strident.
“He needs to be brought up on charges,” declared Lisadiana Bates, a former business owner who is home-schooling her children. Echoing Dr. Robert Malone, who has become a conservative celebrity by arguing that Covid vaccine mandates are unethical experiments, she asserted that Dr. Fauci had “violated the Nuremberg Code,” the set of research ethics developed after the Holocaust.
“This whole thing is nothing but an experiment!” Ms. Bates exclaimed.
The roots of anti-Fauci campaign rhetoric can be traced to Washington, where Dr. Fauci has clashed repeatedly with two Republican senators who are also doctors: Mr. Paul, an ophthalmologist, and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, an obstetrician.
Mr. Paul has fueled speculation that Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak produced by federally funded “gain-of-function” research — high-risk studies aimed at making viruses more infectious — in Wuhan, China. Dr. Fauci and other National Institutes of Health officials have said that the Wuhan research did not meet the criteria for gain-of-function studies, and that it is genetically impossible for viruses studied there to have produced the pandemic.
The nuances of that dispute, however, have gotten lost in the increasingly hostile exchanges between the two men. In July, after Mr. Paul accused him of lying to Congress, Dr. Fauci shot back, “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.” Last month, Dr. Fauci arrived at a Senate hearing brandishing a fund-raising webpage for Mr. Paul that included a “Fire Dr. Fauci” graphic, and accused Mr. Paul of exploiting the pandemic for political gain.
Later in that same hearing, Dr. Fauci muttered under his breath that Mr. Marshall was “a moron” — a comment caught on an open microphone — after the senator posted Dr. Fauci’s salary on a placard and demanded his financial disclosure forms, suggesting he might be engaged in financial “shenanigans” with the pharmaceutical industry.
(Dr. Fauci’s financial disclosure forms, which Mr. Marshall has since posted on the internet, show investments in bonds and mutual funds, not drug companies. He is paid an annual salary of $434,312 under a provision that allows government doctors and scientists to be highly compensated, akin to what they could earn in the private sector.)
Dr. Fauci said he did not regret the “moron” remark, or the pushback against Mr. Paul. But Ms. Timken said calling Mr. Marshall a moron was “beyond the pale.”
Even some Fauci fans in academia and government say he might have been better off keeping his cool to avoid amplifying his Republican critics and alienating voters who need to hear his public health message. Some suggest he lower his profile; he says the White House asks him to go on TV.
“He’s been pushing back in a way that is not common for us to see for American scientists, and I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
If Democrats lose seats in the midterm elections, as many expect, Dr. Fauci may have a Republican-controlled Congress to contend with. Another Republican from Ohio, Representative Jim Jordan, who claims that Dr. Fauci knew the coronavirus “came from a lab,” has vowed that Republicans will investigate him if they win control of the House.
Some of Dr. Fauci’s friends are urging him to avoid that possibility by retiring. He has been working on a memoir, but cannot look for a publisher while he is still a federal employee. Dr. Fauci says Republicans will not dictate the terms of his retirement, and he has no plans at the moment to step down. And, he said, he is not worried about any investigation.
“I can’t think of what they would want to investigate except this whole pile of lies that they’re throwing around,” he said.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg is a Washington Correspondent covering health policy. In more than two decades at The Times, she has also covered the White House, Congress and national politics. Previously, at The Los Angeles Times, she shared in two Pulitzer Prizes won by that newspaper’s Metro staff.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/us/p ... pe=Article
Re: TrumpReich in action
Comparisons between GOP and Right and the 30's Reich once again shone to be apt:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2022/02/0 ... rig-as.cnn
https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2022/02/0 ... rig-as.cnn
Re: TrumpReich in action
There’s a New Surveillance State. It’s Your Neighbor.
Feb. 3, 2022
By Frank Bruni
Contributing Opinion Writer
The citizens of Virginia have been called to battle. They’ve been shown the enemy. They’ve been armed — not with physical weapons, but with an email address where they can send reports of anything suspicious that they see in their children’s schools, anything they deem disrespectful in their children’s classrooms, anything in a teacher’s or administrator’s conduct that rankles.
That’s no simple encouragement of greater involvement in their children’s education. It’s a summons to surveillance. It’s a blessing for snitching. Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced the email address — basically, a digital tip line — early last week, vaguely explaining that he was interested in reports of “divisive practices” for cataloging and “rooting out.” His action springs from his pledge, during his campaign for governor, to stop the teaching of critical race theory or anything like it in the state’s public schools, but it’s broader and fuzzier than that. It’s also ripe for abuse.
And it brought to mind the terrible abortion law enacted by state lawmakers and Gov. Greg Abbott last year in Texas, where just about anyone who knows or suspects that a Texan has aided someone in getting an abortion can file a civil lawsuit against that person and, if the suit succeeds, expect at least a $10,000 reward. A person can collect that reward multiple times by identifying abettors of additional abortions. Vigilantism meets bounty hunting meets some nuclear version of political partisanship in a country that needs more prompts for coolheaded civility, not more pushes toward hot-blooded vengeance.
This is scary and wrong. Put aside your position on abortion, about which there are deeply felt differences of opinion and understandable debate, and your interest in public-school pedagogy, which is a subject of legitimate discussion. Is the way to address Americans’ disagreements to transform citizens into snoops and have them turn on one another? Our leaders should point us toward common ground, not add whole new weapons to our battlegrounds. In Virginia and Texas, they added weapons.
In West Virginia, too. Last November, as Donald Trump assiduously sowed doubts about the integrity of American elections, its secretary of state, Mac Warner, announced a “See Something, TEXT Something!” program that created a phone number to which the state’s residents could send text messages about suspicions that a person or people were voting illegally or engaged in voter fraud. It “allows a citizen easy and immediate access to file a confidential complaint,” he said in a written statement about the effort. As with Youngkin’s tip line in Virginia, its potential misuse as a tool for pure harassment and partisan recrimination is enormous.
Does anyone really doubt that the Virginia tip line will receive some complaints from parents who are merely steamed that a teacher was stern with or aloof to their child? Or that the West Virginia phone number will be texted by a few people bothered that neighbors with darker skin head to the same voting site that they visit?
In the decades since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, with our growing awareness of the porous and penetrable boundaries of cyberspace, we have worried plenty — and rightly — about government surveillance, about how easy it can be for unseen actors employed by the state to spy on and meddle with us.
The Virginia, Texas and West Virginia developments suggest another kind of surveillance, born not of technology but of tribalism and so utterly of this acrimonious moment, when so many Americans are so edgily on guard and so eager to point fingers. What we sweepingly and inexactly refer to as cancel culture is, in part, the online aggressiveness of Americans who patrol for transgressions and prosecute the transgressors. And there can be a thin line between holding people accountable because they’ve done clear wrong and mercilessly vilifying them because they have contrary views or expressed themselves clumsily.
We lose sight of it. We cross it. And our leaders are just as lost. They should be uniting us, not inciting us. The latter is all too easy: We’re dangerously riled up as is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/opin ... w_arm_10_1
Feb. 3, 2022
By Frank Bruni
Contributing Opinion Writer
The citizens of Virginia have been called to battle. They’ve been shown the enemy. They’ve been armed — not with physical weapons, but with an email address where they can send reports of anything suspicious that they see in their children’s schools, anything they deem disrespectful in their children’s classrooms, anything in a teacher’s or administrator’s conduct that rankles.
That’s no simple encouragement of greater involvement in their children’s education. It’s a summons to surveillance. It’s a blessing for snitching. Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced the email address — basically, a digital tip line — early last week, vaguely explaining that he was interested in reports of “divisive practices” for cataloging and “rooting out.” His action springs from his pledge, during his campaign for governor, to stop the teaching of critical race theory or anything like it in the state’s public schools, but it’s broader and fuzzier than that. It’s also ripe for abuse.
And it brought to mind the terrible abortion law enacted by state lawmakers and Gov. Greg Abbott last year in Texas, where just about anyone who knows or suspects that a Texan has aided someone in getting an abortion can file a civil lawsuit against that person and, if the suit succeeds, expect at least a $10,000 reward. A person can collect that reward multiple times by identifying abettors of additional abortions. Vigilantism meets bounty hunting meets some nuclear version of political partisanship in a country that needs more prompts for coolheaded civility, not more pushes toward hot-blooded vengeance.
This is scary and wrong. Put aside your position on abortion, about which there are deeply felt differences of opinion and understandable debate, and your interest in public-school pedagogy, which is a subject of legitimate discussion. Is the way to address Americans’ disagreements to transform citizens into snoops and have them turn on one another? Our leaders should point us toward common ground, not add whole new weapons to our battlegrounds. In Virginia and Texas, they added weapons.
In West Virginia, too. Last November, as Donald Trump assiduously sowed doubts about the integrity of American elections, its secretary of state, Mac Warner, announced a “See Something, TEXT Something!” program that created a phone number to which the state’s residents could send text messages about suspicions that a person or people were voting illegally or engaged in voter fraud. It “allows a citizen easy and immediate access to file a confidential complaint,” he said in a written statement about the effort. As with Youngkin’s tip line in Virginia, its potential misuse as a tool for pure harassment and partisan recrimination is enormous.
Does anyone really doubt that the Virginia tip line will receive some complaints from parents who are merely steamed that a teacher was stern with or aloof to their child? Or that the West Virginia phone number will be texted by a few people bothered that neighbors with darker skin head to the same voting site that they visit?
In the decades since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, with our growing awareness of the porous and penetrable boundaries of cyberspace, we have worried plenty — and rightly — about government surveillance, about how easy it can be for unseen actors employed by the state to spy on and meddle with us.
The Virginia, Texas and West Virginia developments suggest another kind of surveillance, born not of technology but of tribalism and so utterly of this acrimonious moment, when so many Americans are so edgily on guard and so eager to point fingers. What we sweepingly and inexactly refer to as cancel culture is, in part, the online aggressiveness of Americans who patrol for transgressions and prosecute the transgressors. And there can be a thin line between holding people accountable because they’ve done clear wrong and mercilessly vilifying them because they have contrary views or expressed themselves clumsily.
We lose sight of it. We cross it. And our leaders are just as lost. They should be uniting us, not inciting us. The latter is all too easy: We’re dangerously riled up as is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/opin ... w_arm_10_1
Re: TrumpReich in action
From Kansas City Star today:
" Kansas Senate overrides Kelly veto of GOP-drawn map after Republicans switch votes.
One Republican senator criticized the map, then voted to pass it over Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto."
Democrat Kelly vetoed the map because harmful to minority voters.
" Kansas Senate overrides Kelly veto of GOP-drawn map after Republicans switch votes.
One Republican senator criticized the map, then voted to pass it over Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto."
Democrat Kelly vetoed the map because harmful to minority voters.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Cedar Rapids,Iowa Gazette today:
The Human Services Committee amended (Iowa) House File 2119, which would prohibit a person from dispensing an abortion-inducing drug except in a health care setting — and not by receiving the drug by mail. An amendment rolled another bill, House File 383, onto HF 2119.
HF 383, approved by a subcommittee earlier in the day, would require anyone providing medication abortions — which accounted for 80 percent of the abortions performed in Iowa last year — to inform women of “the effectiveness and possibility of avoiding, ceasing or even reversing the effects of a medication abortion.”
The amendment made a bad bill worse, said Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell, D-Ames. “This is such a bad bill it’s hard to zero in on what’s the worst part,” she said.
Medication abortions are a “wonderful method” for women needing them, she said, adding they have a 99 percent safety record.
Rep. John Forbes, D-Urbandale, a pharmacist, expressed reservations about the drugs proponents said could be used to reverse a medication abortion.
He said he could find no clinical trials to lend credibility to the claims that a medically induced abortion could be reversed or the impact on a fetus of first inducing an abortion drug and then attempting to reverse it.
The Human Services Committee amended (Iowa) House File 2119, which would prohibit a person from dispensing an abortion-inducing drug except in a health care setting — and not by receiving the drug by mail. An amendment rolled another bill, House File 383, onto HF 2119.
HF 383, approved by a subcommittee earlier in the day, would require anyone providing medication abortions — which accounted for 80 percent of the abortions performed in Iowa last year — to inform women of “the effectiveness and possibility of avoiding, ceasing or even reversing the effects of a medication abortion.”
The amendment made a bad bill worse, said Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell, D-Ames. “This is such a bad bill it’s hard to zero in on what’s the worst part,” she said.
Medication abortions are a “wonderful method” for women needing them, she said, adding they have a 99 percent safety record.
Rep. John Forbes, D-Urbandale, a pharmacist, expressed reservations about the drugs proponents said could be used to reverse a medication abortion.
He said he could find no clinical trials to lend credibility to the claims that a medically induced abortion could be reversed or the impact on a fetus of first inducing an abortion drug and then attempting to reverse it.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Yikes!Rach3 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 10, 2022 12:08 pmRepublicans against women, again:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/09/politics ... index.html
They would!
Re: TrumpReich in action
Why an Arizona County Turned Down $1.9 Million in Covid Relief
Two Republican supervisors voted to reject the federal money, frustrating health care workers in rural Cochise County.
By Jack Healy
Jack Healy covers life in the Southwest. He logged 500 miles driving to and around Cochise County, Arizona, meeting residents.
Feb. 11, 2022
Updated 9:14 a.m. ET
The $1.9 million in pandemic aid would have gone a long way in Cochise County, a rural borderland where a winter of infections swamped hospitals. There was money for tracking cases. Testing in remote ranching towns. Funds fortifying the Arizona county’s strained health department.
But the county’s Republican-controlled board of supervisors stunned many residents and health care workers by voting last month to reject the federal money, becoming one of the rare places in America to turn down Covid-19 assistance from Washington.
“We’re done,” said Peggy Judd, one of two Republican supervisors who voted against accepting the money. “We’re treating it like the common cold.”
The vote transformed what would usually be a rote line on a government agenda into an emotional flashpoint in this county of 125,000 people where life is shaped by the southwestern border, rhythms of ranching and, now, a pandemic that has killed 522 residents.
To conservatives, rejecting the money felt like a high-desert declaration of independence, even if their rural county does rely on a host of other federal spending and jobs provided by the Fort Huachuca Army base.
Doctors and hospital officials, generally reluctant to plunge into divisive debates in their largely conservative county, started speaking out after they saw news of the 2-1 vote in The Herald/Review, the local newspaper. Some criticized the supervisors for reinforcing local vaccine resistance with a welter of anti-vaccine misinformation.
“It’s insanity,” said Dr. Cristian Laguillo, who has been treating a crush of Covid-19 patients at Copper Queen Community Hospital in the old copper-mining town of Bisbee. “It was a decision made without thought, without care. That’s maddening.”
More than 200 small rural towns across the country have declined pandemic funds from the Biden administration, according to a survey from the National League of Cities, representing a tiny fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into cities and states.
The Treasury Department has already sent out $245 billion to local, state and tribal governments through the American Rescue Plan. A vast majority have eagerly taken the money, including some elected Republican leaders who had opposed the measure. The money has flowed toward schools, health care systems and affordable housing, but also non-Covid projects such as prison construction, highway projects and tax cuts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Some tiny towns say they have no use for the coronavirus relief as the pandemic trudges into a third year. And other conservative rural officials are turning down the money as a public repudiation of vaccine mandates, the $30 trillion national debt and a persistent pandemic that is killing 2,500 people each day even as new cases ebb and Democratic states lift pandemic restrictions like mask rules.
In Cochise County, critics said they were particularly stung by the timing. The January vote rejecting the money came as Omicron cases surged across the county, with the federal government sending in a 15-person strike team at the request of the county’s largest hospital, Canyon Vista Medical Center.
Since there are few intensive-care beds in the county, doctors said they were spending hours on the phone pleading with crowded hospitals in Utah, Texas or Phoenix to take patients too sick to stay in Cochise County. State data shows that about 70 percent of the county’s residents are vaccinated, but health workers say those numbers may be inflated by Mexican citizens who cross the border to get vaccinated.
The Cochise supervisors who voted against the $1.9 million have raised doubts about the safety and reliability of the vaccines, despite no evidence. Ms. Judd said she and her family had recovered from Covid-19 in November after drinking orange juice spiked with ivermectin, a drug commonly used to treat animal parasites that has become a go-to remedy for vaccine opponents. She said she and her family remain unvaccinated.
“We’re those people,” she said in a telephone interview, coughing occasionally — a lingering sign of the infection.
The fight in Cochise County is one skirmish in a larger battle that conservative governors and local leaders are having with the Biden administration over how to hand out billions of dollars in Covid-19 money, echoing fights over whether states would expand Medicaid under Obamacare.
Thirteen mostly Republican-led states sued the Biden administration over restrictions in the coronavirus relief law that would have prevented them from using federal money to offset tax cuts. The Treasury Department has also fought with Republican governors in Florida and Arizona who have sought to deny federal funds to schools with mask mandates.
Two dozen states cut off expanded unemployment benefits last summer, saying the extra money from the federal government was deterring unemployed Americans from seeking work. And a handful such as Idaho and Iowa have rejected or not spent millions in pandemic aid for school testing and rental assistance.
Alicia Thompson, Cochise County’s director of health and social services, applied for the disputed money more than a year ago with the hope of, among other things, more testing in rural areas, assessing how Covid-19 had affected the community and hiring a finance director.
In the intervening months, she has lost one cousin to the virus and had another hospitalized on a ventilator. She still goes to work masked up to try not to bring home the virus to her husband, who has chronic lung disease. When the vote on the money arrived, she expected that the county would accept it.
“It was a shock to me,” Dr. Thompson said. “I’ve been scrambling to figure out, What are other ways, how can we still get those services to community members?”
Ms. Judd said she had voted to accept other federal funds for housing, law enforcement, fighting the opioid crisis and addressing other economic and health tolls of the pandemic. But she said she rejected the $1.9 million — which originated with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — because she was dubious about doing contact tracing, public health surveys and hiring a security guard at the health department.
The other Cochise supervisor who voted against the money, Tom Crosby, compared Covid-19 vaccines to Agent Orange, the cancer-causing herbicide that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands during the Vietnam War. He said he wanted “to get the county out of the vaccine business.”
As the board weighed whether to take the money at a meeting, Mr. Crosby reminded the county’s public health director that he had supported anti-Covid efforts earlier in the pandemic. But now?
“The overall government trend is toward threatening and eroding constitutional rights,” he said.
It was not the first time Cochise County’s leaders have drawn attention for what critics call their dangerous views on vaccines or democracy.
The county’s Republican Party chairman was one of 11 Republicans who falsely claimed to be the state’s true electors despite President Biden’s win in the state. And Ms. Judd and her family traveled to Washington in January 2021 to join the rally against certifying the presidential election. (She later told The Tucson Sentinel that she never entered the Capitol building and posted a statement on Facebook condemning the rioters and violence.)
Ann English, an 80-year-old rancher and retired school administrator, was the lone “yes” vote for taking the $1.9 million. Ms. English, a Democrat, said the vote and the anger catalyzed by Covid that is swirling through the country reflected how deeply misinformation and divisions were now sown into the soil of local politics.
“I don’t understand why anyone would want us to turn down money that would help keep people safer,” Ms. English said. “This is health we’re talking about.”
Jack Healy is a Phoenix-based national correspondent who focuses on the fast-changing politics and climate of the Southwest. He has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s journalism school.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/us/c ... funds.html
Two Republican supervisors voted to reject the federal money, frustrating health care workers in rural Cochise County.
By Jack Healy
Jack Healy covers life in the Southwest. He logged 500 miles driving to and around Cochise County, Arizona, meeting residents.
Feb. 11, 2022
Updated 9:14 a.m. ET
The $1.9 million in pandemic aid would have gone a long way in Cochise County, a rural borderland where a winter of infections swamped hospitals. There was money for tracking cases. Testing in remote ranching towns. Funds fortifying the Arizona county’s strained health department.
But the county’s Republican-controlled board of supervisors stunned many residents and health care workers by voting last month to reject the federal money, becoming one of the rare places in America to turn down Covid-19 assistance from Washington.
“We’re done,” said Peggy Judd, one of two Republican supervisors who voted against accepting the money. “We’re treating it like the common cold.”
The vote transformed what would usually be a rote line on a government agenda into an emotional flashpoint in this county of 125,000 people where life is shaped by the southwestern border, rhythms of ranching and, now, a pandemic that has killed 522 residents.
To conservatives, rejecting the money felt like a high-desert declaration of independence, even if their rural county does rely on a host of other federal spending and jobs provided by the Fort Huachuca Army base.
Doctors and hospital officials, generally reluctant to plunge into divisive debates in their largely conservative county, started speaking out after they saw news of the 2-1 vote in The Herald/Review, the local newspaper. Some criticized the supervisors for reinforcing local vaccine resistance with a welter of anti-vaccine misinformation.
“It’s insanity,” said Dr. Cristian Laguillo, who has been treating a crush of Covid-19 patients at Copper Queen Community Hospital in the old copper-mining town of Bisbee. “It was a decision made without thought, without care. That’s maddening.”
More than 200 small rural towns across the country have declined pandemic funds from the Biden administration, according to a survey from the National League of Cities, representing a tiny fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into cities and states.
The Treasury Department has already sent out $245 billion to local, state and tribal governments through the American Rescue Plan. A vast majority have eagerly taken the money, including some elected Republican leaders who had opposed the measure. The money has flowed toward schools, health care systems and affordable housing, but also non-Covid projects such as prison construction, highway projects and tax cuts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Some tiny towns say they have no use for the coronavirus relief as the pandemic trudges into a third year. And other conservative rural officials are turning down the money as a public repudiation of vaccine mandates, the $30 trillion national debt and a persistent pandemic that is killing 2,500 people each day even as new cases ebb and Democratic states lift pandemic restrictions like mask rules.
In Cochise County, critics said they were particularly stung by the timing. The January vote rejecting the money came as Omicron cases surged across the county, with the federal government sending in a 15-person strike team at the request of the county’s largest hospital, Canyon Vista Medical Center.
Since there are few intensive-care beds in the county, doctors said they were spending hours on the phone pleading with crowded hospitals in Utah, Texas or Phoenix to take patients too sick to stay in Cochise County. State data shows that about 70 percent of the county’s residents are vaccinated, but health workers say those numbers may be inflated by Mexican citizens who cross the border to get vaccinated.
The Cochise supervisors who voted against the $1.9 million have raised doubts about the safety and reliability of the vaccines, despite no evidence. Ms. Judd said she and her family had recovered from Covid-19 in November after drinking orange juice spiked with ivermectin, a drug commonly used to treat animal parasites that has become a go-to remedy for vaccine opponents. She said she and her family remain unvaccinated.
“We’re those people,” she said in a telephone interview, coughing occasionally — a lingering sign of the infection.
The fight in Cochise County is one skirmish in a larger battle that conservative governors and local leaders are having with the Biden administration over how to hand out billions of dollars in Covid-19 money, echoing fights over whether states would expand Medicaid under Obamacare.
Thirteen mostly Republican-led states sued the Biden administration over restrictions in the coronavirus relief law that would have prevented them from using federal money to offset tax cuts. The Treasury Department has also fought with Republican governors in Florida and Arizona who have sought to deny federal funds to schools with mask mandates.
Two dozen states cut off expanded unemployment benefits last summer, saying the extra money from the federal government was deterring unemployed Americans from seeking work. And a handful such as Idaho and Iowa have rejected or not spent millions in pandemic aid for school testing and rental assistance.
Alicia Thompson, Cochise County’s director of health and social services, applied for the disputed money more than a year ago with the hope of, among other things, more testing in rural areas, assessing how Covid-19 had affected the community and hiring a finance director.
In the intervening months, she has lost one cousin to the virus and had another hospitalized on a ventilator. She still goes to work masked up to try not to bring home the virus to her husband, who has chronic lung disease. When the vote on the money arrived, she expected that the county would accept it.
“It was a shock to me,” Dr. Thompson said. “I’ve been scrambling to figure out, What are other ways, how can we still get those services to community members?”
Ms. Judd said she had voted to accept other federal funds for housing, law enforcement, fighting the opioid crisis and addressing other economic and health tolls of the pandemic. But she said she rejected the $1.9 million — which originated with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — because she was dubious about doing contact tracing, public health surveys and hiring a security guard at the health department.
The other Cochise supervisor who voted against the money, Tom Crosby, compared Covid-19 vaccines to Agent Orange, the cancer-causing herbicide that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands during the Vietnam War. He said he wanted “to get the county out of the vaccine business.”
As the board weighed whether to take the money at a meeting, Mr. Crosby reminded the county’s public health director that he had supported anti-Covid efforts earlier in the pandemic. But now?
“The overall government trend is toward threatening and eroding constitutional rights,” he said.
It was not the first time Cochise County’s leaders have drawn attention for what critics call their dangerous views on vaccines or democracy.
The county’s Republican Party chairman was one of 11 Republicans who falsely claimed to be the state’s true electors despite President Biden’s win in the state. And Ms. Judd and her family traveled to Washington in January 2021 to join the rally against certifying the presidential election. (She later told The Tucson Sentinel that she never entered the Capitol building and posted a statement on Facebook condemning the rioters and violence.)
Ann English, an 80-year-old rancher and retired school administrator, was the lone “yes” vote for taking the $1.9 million. Ms. English, a Democrat, said the vote and the anger catalyzed by Covid that is swirling through the country reflected how deeply misinformation and divisions were now sown into the soil of local politics.
“I don’t understand why anyone would want us to turn down money that would help keep people safer,” Ms. English said. “This is health we’re talking about.”
Jack Healy is a Phoenix-based national correspondent who focuses on the fast-changing politics and climate of the Southwest. He has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s journalism school.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/us/c ... funds.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
Trump suggests death penalty for some Dems; Gym Jordan agrees:
HuffPost
Jim Jordan Appears To Embrace Trump's Call To Execute Hillary Clinton Campaign Aides
Ed Mazza
Mon, February 14, 2022, 12:14 AM
Donald Trump is calling for the execution of some who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign ― and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) seems to be on board.
“We’ve never seen anything like this in history,” Jordan said on “Fox & Friends” on Sunday. “So, President Trump’s statement yesterday, I think is right on target.”
Trump and Jordan were referencing a Feb. 11 filing by Justice Department special counsel John Durham reported by Fox News that claims the Clinton campaign paid a tech company to “infiltrate” Trump Tower servers looking for links between Trump and Russia.
“In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death,” Trump said in a statement.
Jordan, a staunch Trump supporter, appears to agree.
As Mediaite notes, the Fox News hosts didn’t specifically mention Trump’s call for execution during the interview. Jordan, however, shared a link to the Fox News story, which included the full statement from Trump.
Jordan has refused to cooperate with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol carried out by Trump supporters.
Jordan spoke with the then-president that morning, before the assault, and again during the riot, after lawmakers fled the floor. His statements about the calls have been inconsistent.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/jim-jordan-e ... 48429.html
HuffPost
Jim Jordan Appears To Embrace Trump's Call To Execute Hillary Clinton Campaign Aides
Ed Mazza
Mon, February 14, 2022, 12:14 AM
Donald Trump is calling for the execution of some who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign ― and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) seems to be on board.
“We’ve never seen anything like this in history,” Jordan said on “Fox & Friends” on Sunday. “So, President Trump’s statement yesterday, I think is right on target.”
Trump and Jordan were referencing a Feb. 11 filing by Justice Department special counsel John Durham reported by Fox News that claims the Clinton campaign paid a tech company to “infiltrate” Trump Tower servers looking for links between Trump and Russia.
“In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death,” Trump said in a statement.
Jordan, a staunch Trump supporter, appears to agree.
As Mediaite notes, the Fox News hosts didn’t specifically mention Trump’s call for execution during the interview. Jordan, however, shared a link to the Fox News story, which included the full statement from Trump.
Jordan has refused to cooperate with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol carried out by Trump supporters.
Jordan spoke with the then-president that morning, before the assault, and again during the riot, after lawmakers fled the floor. His statements about the calls have been inconsistent.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/jim-jordan-e ... 48429.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
2020 Election Denier Will Run for Top Elections Position in Colorado
Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk, has been stripped of her county election oversight but is seeking to oversee her state’s elections as secretary of state.
By Azi Paybarah
Feb. 14, 2022
A Republican county clerk in Colorado who was stripped of her responsibility of overseeing county elections is joining a growing movement of people throughout the country who spread false claims about fraud in the 2020 presidential election and want to oversee the next one.
Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk, who is facing accusations that she breached the security of voting machines, announced on Monday that she would run to be the top elections official in Colorado.
At least three Republican challengers are already running to unseat the current Colorado secretary of state, Jena Griswold, a Democrat.
Colorado is a purple state that President Biden won with 55 percent of the vote in 2020. The state’s primary is on June 28, and Colorado is one of 27 states whose top elections official will be on the ballot this year.
In 2020, when former President Donald J. Trump and his allies sought to undo the results of the election, they focused their pressure campaign on these relatively little-known officeholders.
“I am the wall between your vote and nationalized elections,” Ms. Peters said during an appearance Monday on a podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled former top aide to Mr. Trump. “They are coming after me because I am standing in their way — of truth, transparency and elections held closest to the people.”
Ms. Griswold, who is also the head of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said in a statement on Monday that Ms. Peters was “unfit to be secretary of state and a danger to Colorado elections,” citing Ms. Peters’s attempts to discredit the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Ms. Peters did not immediately respond to telephone and email messages on Monday seeking comment.
Elected in 2018, Ms. Peters took office as clerk and recorder of Mesa County, in far western Colorado, in 2019. By late 2021 a Mesa County Court judge had upheld Ms. Griswold’s removing Ms. Peters from overseeing elections in the county and replacing her with an appointee.
In May of last year, Ms. Peters and two other people entered a secure area of a warehouse in Mesa County where crucial election information was stored. They copied hard drives and election-management software from voting machines, the authorities said.
In early August, the conservative website Gateway Pundit posted passwords for the county’s election machines. In October Ms. Peters spoke at a gathering in South Dakota of people determined to show that the 2020 election had been stolen from Mr. Trump.
The gathering also featured a large screen that, at one point, showed the software from the election machines in Mesa County.
Ms. Griswold said her office had concluded that the passwords leaked out when Ms. Peters enlisted a staff member to accompany her to surreptitiously record a routine voting-machine maintenance procedure. State and county officials announced last month that a grand jury was looking into allegations of tampering with Mesa County election equipment and “official misconduct.”
More recently, Ms. Peters was briefly detained by the police when she obstructed efforts by officials with the local district attorney to serve a search warrant for her iPad. Ms. Peters may have used the iPad to record a court proceeding related to one of her deputies, according to Stephanie Reecy, a spokeswoman for the county.
In video of the Feb. 8 encounter, taken by a bystander and posted on Twitter, Ms. Peters can be heard repeatedly saying, “Let go of me,” as officers seek to detain her. “It hurts. Let go of me,” she says, before bending her leg and raising her foot toward the officer standing behind her.
An officer responds, “Do not kick,” according to body camera video posted by KJCT News 8, a local station. “Do you understand?”
Ms. Peters was charged with obstructing a peace officer and obstructing government operations, according to the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office. She turned herself in to the authorities on Thursday, posted $500 bond and was released, according to county officials.
“I still have the bruises on my arm where they manhandled me,” Ms. Peters told Mr. Bannon on Monday. Later she said: “I just want to say I love the people. That’s why I’m doing this.”
Mr. Bannon said Ms. Peters had been targeted because of her fight against “this globalist apparatus.”
“Thank you,” Ms. Peters told the host. “I’ll work hard for you guys.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/us/t ... ction.html
Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk, has been stripped of her county election oversight but is seeking to oversee her state’s elections as secretary of state.
By Azi Paybarah
Feb. 14, 2022
A Republican county clerk in Colorado who was stripped of her responsibility of overseeing county elections is joining a growing movement of people throughout the country who spread false claims about fraud in the 2020 presidential election and want to oversee the next one.
Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk, who is facing accusations that she breached the security of voting machines, announced on Monday that she would run to be the top elections official in Colorado.
At least three Republican challengers are already running to unseat the current Colorado secretary of state, Jena Griswold, a Democrat.
Colorado is a purple state that President Biden won with 55 percent of the vote in 2020. The state’s primary is on June 28, and Colorado is one of 27 states whose top elections official will be on the ballot this year.
In 2020, when former President Donald J. Trump and his allies sought to undo the results of the election, they focused their pressure campaign on these relatively little-known officeholders.
“I am the wall between your vote and nationalized elections,” Ms. Peters said during an appearance Monday on a podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled former top aide to Mr. Trump. “They are coming after me because I am standing in their way — of truth, transparency and elections held closest to the people.”
Ms. Griswold, who is also the head of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said in a statement on Monday that Ms. Peters was “unfit to be secretary of state and a danger to Colorado elections,” citing Ms. Peters’s attempts to discredit the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Ms. Peters did not immediately respond to telephone and email messages on Monday seeking comment.
Elected in 2018, Ms. Peters took office as clerk and recorder of Mesa County, in far western Colorado, in 2019. By late 2021 a Mesa County Court judge had upheld Ms. Griswold’s removing Ms. Peters from overseeing elections in the county and replacing her with an appointee.
In May of last year, Ms. Peters and two other people entered a secure area of a warehouse in Mesa County where crucial election information was stored. They copied hard drives and election-management software from voting machines, the authorities said.
In early August, the conservative website Gateway Pundit posted passwords for the county’s election machines. In October Ms. Peters spoke at a gathering in South Dakota of people determined to show that the 2020 election had been stolen from Mr. Trump.
The gathering also featured a large screen that, at one point, showed the software from the election machines in Mesa County.
Ms. Griswold said her office had concluded that the passwords leaked out when Ms. Peters enlisted a staff member to accompany her to surreptitiously record a routine voting-machine maintenance procedure. State and county officials announced last month that a grand jury was looking into allegations of tampering with Mesa County election equipment and “official misconduct.”
More recently, Ms. Peters was briefly detained by the police when she obstructed efforts by officials with the local district attorney to serve a search warrant for her iPad. Ms. Peters may have used the iPad to record a court proceeding related to one of her deputies, according to Stephanie Reecy, a spokeswoman for the county.
In video of the Feb. 8 encounter, taken by a bystander and posted on Twitter, Ms. Peters can be heard repeatedly saying, “Let go of me,” as officers seek to detain her. “It hurts. Let go of me,” she says, before bending her leg and raising her foot toward the officer standing behind her.
An officer responds, “Do not kick,” according to body camera video posted by KJCT News 8, a local station. “Do you understand?”
Ms. Peters was charged with obstructing a peace officer and obstructing government operations, according to the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office. She turned herself in to the authorities on Thursday, posted $500 bond and was released, according to county officials.
“I still have the bruises on my arm where they manhandled me,” Ms. Peters told Mr. Bannon on Monday. Later she said: “I just want to say I love the people. That’s why I’m doing this.”
Mr. Bannon said Ms. Peters had been targeted because of her fight against “this globalist apparatus.”
“Thank you,” Ms. Peters told the host. “I’ll work hard for you guys.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/us/t ... ction.html
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