That’s quite a precipitous drop in pride and happiness which seems to have happened right around 2017. Hmmm…
"what digby sez..."
Month: June 2020
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) announced on Tuesday he has issued subpoenas for two Department of Justice whistleblowers as part of the committee’s probe into alleged politicization of the agency under President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr.
One of the officials, Aaron Zelinsky, resigned from the team that was prosecuting Trump associate Roger Stone after Barr intervened to soften Stone’s sentencing recommendation.
- The other, John Elias, was reportedly looking into a fuel efficiency deal between large automakers and the state of California. Democrats have called the probe politically motivated.
- The two will testify before the committee, along with former Deputy Attorney General Donald Ayer, on June 24.
Barr has been accused of acting as Trump’s personal lawyer throughout his tenure. He has launched and overseen aggressive investigations into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe, including one led by veteran prosecutor John Durham that could result in criminal charges leading up to November’s election.
- More than 2,000 former DOJ officials have signed onto a pair of statements calling on Barr to resign for his interventions in the Stone case and the prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The DOJ is currently seeking to drop charges against Flynn, but is facing resistance from the judge overseeing the case.
Resistance? Yeah, thats one way of putting it.
Meanwhile, in Bizarro World:
- Barr denied doing “the president’s bidding” in an interview with CBS News last month, arguing that “partisan feelings are so strong that people have lost any sense of justice.”
He’s not wrong. But he should be looking in the mirror.
I have to wonder if Barr ever has a moment of clarity in which he realizes that his ride on the Trump train was a mistake.
Nah …
By the way, it’s extremely important that the Democrats not drop this in the next congress. There has to be a reckoning or the lesson will be that Republicans can get away with anything.
Someone with COVID-19 will attend the Tulsa Trump rally.
When we alert the Oklahoma Health Department the Trump campaign will scream about having to turn over the attendee data for contact tracing. They won’t want to do it, even though it will save lives.
The attendees will scream about Trump’s betrayal. They won’t be able to own the libs by getting infected and dying!
How do we do this? By using the campaign’s desire to please Trump with big audience numbers against them. We take their lack of concern for anyone’s life but Trump’s and use it to save lives.
The Trump Campaign should have mandated masks and held it outside with social distancing. But they didn’t, so now the correct procedure after news of an infection should be to alert everyone who attended.
Attendee data should be turned over to Col. Lance T. Frye, M.D. the commissioner for Oklahoma State Department of Health (OSDH) to start contact tracing. But will it be?
1) The Trump campaign admits they have all attendee data. (Especially inside, no entry without registered ticket. )
2) It’s legal to turn over the data
— June 3, OK Attorney General Mike Hunter today advised the Oklahoma State Department of Health (OSDH) that releasing the data about COVID-19 infections does not violate state or federal law, as long as individuals are not identifiable. (Link)
3)The Trump Campaign doesn’t care about the health of their followers. We know that. They care about being sued and are doing the minimum to avoid charges of gross negligence. As shown by this tweet.
BTW, I’ve identified another source that has the legal right to attendee data. If the Trump campaign doesn’t turn over the data IMMEDIATELY, I would contact the Tulsa City Councilor, Vanessa Hall-Harper, the Tulsa State Senator, Kevin Matthews and The Tulsa State Rep. Regina Goodwin who would get this other source to turn over the attendee data to Oklahoma’s health department for contact tracing.
Trump’s campaign will stall, the Governor will say it’s not required, the health department will say it’s impossible because the state has no funding for contact tracing and the CDC/federal government won’t help. IF THAT HAPPENS WE CAN STILL USE THOSE FAILURES and Trump’s “natural experiment” in bad science and policy to educate the public on the need for masks and epidemiologist recommended contact tracing of people exposed to COVID-19.
- There should be a national education program for all Americans on the need to start wearing masks everywhere.
- There should be a bipartisan law, signed by Trump, that mandates wearing masks until there is a vaccine.
I don’t think a law is going to happen, so in the meantime people on the left need to educate people and figure ways to save the lives of others on the right even if they try to kill themselves.
Infecting Trump Followers To Own The Libs
Trump’s Covid-19 Denial Team is aware of this issue and will have made up reasons to not turn over attendee data. Their reasons will be BS and will delay the process for weeks. That means more infections to innocent people who didn’t sign a waiver and didn’t give their consent to risk being infected.
Instead of wanting to help people no matter HOW or WHERE they got infected, they will deny the one to one causality of COVID 19 infections from their indoor rally. “You can’t prove they got infected at OUR rally!”
They will compare COVID 19 infections rates at George Floyd outdoor protests. “You chose to go to a protest and you were exposed to COVID-19. Why didn’t you stop protesting?” They will make false comparisons. “How would you like it if the government took the cell phone data from the protest and turned it over to the Health Department so they can alert people who have been exposed so they can start self isolating?”
(BTW, the police probably have your cell phone data from protests. They COULD use that data for public health, but will they? They are sitting on it until they get subpoenas for criminal cases and civil lawsuits on police brutality.)
It is insane that the Trump Campaign won’t turn over attendee info to its own health agencies or red state health department agencies even it it could SAVE THE LIVES OF THEIR FOLLOWERS! However, they WILL give that data to anyone that wants to sell Trump supporters MAGA hats.
Yes, saving the lives of Trump supporters are in our own self interest, since they can infect us too. But we should do it even without earning self-interest points. We must bear their mockery when they call our life saving mask wearing “virtue signalling.” We do it because it’s the right thing to do. It’s what patriotic citizens of the United States of America do.
I’m going to quote philosopher T.M. Scanlon’s book title featured in the NBC hit show ‘The Good Place, We will do all these things because it’s part of What We Owe to Each Other.“
In the aftermath of last weekend’s police shooting in Atlanta of Rayshard Brooks, some interviewee noted the differences in how police behave towards citizens in white neighborhoods and black ones. In white neighborhoods, they are more polite, more restrained. In minority neighborhoods, they are rougher, more authoritarian and unforgiving. Rookies pick up the difference in style from training officers and internalize it. It’s not formally taught. It’s acculturation.
Jon Stewart, longtime host of ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ speaks to that in his New York Times magazine interview. Stewart, 57, offers an eye-popping metaphor for how police function in this country. There’s more to what precipitated the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis than a lack of sensitivity and de-escalation training or a move to community policing. How we do policing is just a symptom. We as a society never address the why of policing:
The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. They’re enforcing segregation. Segregation is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas.
India officially abolished its caste system in 1950. Yet it persists today. Two thousand years of Indian culture don’t vanish with the stroke of a modern pen. Hundreds of years of whites treating black people as America’s untouchable class do not either. The Civil War did not end it. Nor did Brown v. Board of Education. Nor the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts one hundred years later.
Last month, I referenced an interview about the COVID-19 crisis with Sujatha Gidla, a conductor for New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). The author of “Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India” explored the roots of the caste system and what made her Dalit family “untouchable” and other Indians high-caste Brahmins.
Gidla gave a fascinating 2017 interview on that to journalist Sheryl McCarthy of the City University of New York. No amount of education or prosperity can change an untouchable’s status in Indian society. It is why she emigrated to the United States where she found more opportunity but also common cause with African-Americans.
Stewart cites comedian Chris Rock on the persistence of America’s own caste system:
Look, every advancement toward equality has come with the spilling of blood. Then, when that’s over, a defensiveness from the group that had been doing the oppressing. There’s always this begrudging sense that black people are being granted something, when it’s white people’s lack of being able to live up to the defining words of the birth of the country that is the problem. There’s a lack of recognition of the difference in our system. Chris Rock used to do a great bit: ‘‘No white person wants to change places with a black person. They don’t even want to exchange places with me, and I’m rich.’’ It’s true. There’s not a white person out there who would want to be treated like even a successful black person in this country. And if we don’t address the why of that treatment, the how is just window dressing.
Bethel, Ohio (Pop. under 3,000) lies southeast of Cincinnati. Last weekend, a small group held its own Black Lives Matter protest. They were met by the defensiveness Stewart mentioned from white people, many of them bikers, angry about black people getting “specialty” rights.
Observe [timestamp 29:45]:
Raw Story reports:
“I knew there were counter-protests but I never dreamed that grown men would grab our signs and our person. It felt like we were walking a gauntlet,” said 63-year-old Lois Dennis. “I saw a side of America that shamed me.”
“You’re in the wrong town,” said one man carrying an American flag. “Get this on your phone — this ain’t Seattle. You’re not in a Democratic state here. We don’t put up with that sh*t. All lives matter.”
“This is a f*cking Republican state, b*tch,” shouts an even louder man. “We don’t play here.”
White. Beefy. Belligerent. Armed. Easily threatened by opposing views. It’s a type.
Demographic changes mean white people may soon (or eventually) be just another minority in this country. These people know how this country treats minorities. They and their ancestors have been doing most of the “treating” for 400 years. As Stephen Stills once said, they’re scared shitless.
No matter how far down they are on society’s social ladder, some people want someone lower than them. They need someone lower than them. Someone they can look down on and say, well, at least I’m not THEM. Black people have filled that role for centuries. Not as long as India’s untouchables maybe, but the principle is the same.
Police enforce that class barrier, Stewart believes, and he may be right.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled or sensed in any way.
Anderson Cooper just pointed out that this is something humans usually learn at about 18 months of age. The president hasn’t reached that stage yet:
I guess all those people in the hospital and the morgues wouldn’t exist if we didn’t test anyone.
Mike Pence said they have plenty of hospital beds in Tulsa so nobody should worry. Sure, they might get so sick they might die (or give the disease to someone else who could get so sick they might die) but it’s no biggie because they’ll have a bed. I guess that’s marginally better than Trump, since he at least acknowledges that they may be making their own voters sick. But it’s not much.
Brooks’s niece Chassidy Evans said. “On June 12, one of our biggest fears became our reality. Not only did we lose another black, unarmed male. This time it landed on our front doorstep. Not only are we hurt, we are angry. When does this stop? We’re not only pleading for justice. We’re pleading for change.”
Cousin Tiara Brooks : “How many more protests will it take to ensure that the next victim isn’t your cousin, your brother, your uncle, your nephew, your friend or your companion so that we can finally end the suffering of excessive police force?”
Widow Tomika Miller:”I’m scared every day. My family members go out … (and) I don’t even know if they’re going to come home.”
Cousin Gymako Brooks: Life shouldn’t be this complicated. Life shouldn’t be where we have to feel some type of way when we see a police or someone of a different color. If you ask how this young black man was? Look at your children when you see them laugh. That innocence. That joy. That pureness of soul. You’ll have a glimpse of what we lost.
If you missed the whole press conference, watch it. It’s raw and eloquent and profound.
This has to stop.
This person has written a longer explanation of that tweet in the Washington Examiner basically insisting that the shooting was justified because the victim had a taser.
I know you will see the terrible irony of the fact that cops use tasers on unarmed people every single day, often while they are already in custody. Sometimes, people do die and it’s almost always because they are shot repeatedly at very close range, usually as they’re being held down. But the police never acknowledge any of this. In fact, they insist that tasering is perfectly safe.
Here you have someone saying that Rayshard Brooks was armed with a taser and the cop shot him in self-defense.
Keep in mind that this officer also had a taser in his hand. (He’s not the one from whom Brooks took the one he had.) But he switched to the deadly weapon when Brooks turned around with the taser. You know, the non-lethal weapon police use every single day.
Perhaps people forget this, but police are not allowed to kill people except in self-defense. They can’t kill people who are running away, people who fail to comply with their orders, people who mouth off or are uncooperative. They are no different than any other American: the only justifiable homicide is in self-defense.
And yes, there is this idea that if a reasonable person would “feel” his life is in danger he or she can kill someone — and cops are given way too much latitude in that regard. (A lot of the “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” laws rely on this.)
But there can be no saying in this situation that this police officer mistook that taser for a real gun as we’ve seen in some other famous cases. He knew what Brooks had in his hand and he knew very well it was not a lethal threat to him.
He had no reason to grab his gun, much less fire it. But he did.
He should be run out of office for this alone:
The Food and Drug Administration on Monday withdrew emergency use authorizations for two coronavirus treatments that President Donald Trump promoted despite concerns about their safety and effectiveness.
The agency revoked the authorizations for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine after a request from Gary Disbrow, acting director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.
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After reviewing new information from large clinical trials the agency now believes that the suggested dosing regimens “are unlikely to produce an antiviral effect,” FDA chief scientist Denise Hinton said in a letter announcing the decision.
Critics have accused the agency of caving to political pressurewhen it authorized use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in hospitalized Covid-19 patients in late March despite thin evidence. More recent randomized controlled trials have found the drugs do not benefit coronavirus patients, and doctors have reported that hydroxychloroquine can cause heart problems.
Because hydroxychloroquine is approved for other uses — treating lupus and arthritis — doctors could still use it “off label” to treat coronavirus patients, and clinical trials examining their use against Covid-19 can continue. The FDA noted that the version of chloroquine that had been authorized for emergency use is not approved in the U.S. so all use of that drug, donated by Bayer, will now end.
The administration’s focus on the malaria medicines in the early months of the pandemic deepened a divide between the White House and its health agencies. Several administration officials told POLITICO they felt the drugs got outsized attention while FDA scrambled for solutions in March. Other current and former Health and Human Services officials later said that the emergency authorities and White House demands cast a shadow on FDA as it struggled to remain independent.
Rick Bright, the former BARDA director whom Disbrow replaced, has accused health officials of removing him from his role overseeing millions of dollars to develop treatments and vaccines because he raised health concerns about hydroxychloroquine and resisted its widespread use.
Drugmakers donated millions of the pill to the government’s strategic national stockpile after Bright wrote to the FDA requesting for emergency use, a move he now says he was pressured to make.
In April, roughly a month after the FDA authorized emergency use of the drugs, the agency warned against using hydroxychloroquine outside of hospitals and clinical trials because of potentially fatal cardiac side effects. Trump toned down on mentions of the pills during his White House briefings around the same time, but in May told reporters he was taking a course of hydroxychloroquine after a White House aide was diagnosed with the coronavirus.
This month two randomized controlled trials, considered the gold standard for determining whether a drug is effective, concluded that the drug does not prevent coronavirus infection and did not help hospitalized patients.
Another study based on tens of thousands of patient records linked hydroxychloroquine to a higher risk of heart problems, but it was withdrawn after questions arose about the quality of the data it used. Doctors have anecdotally reported that the pills, especially when paired with antibiotic azithromycin, can cause heart problems like arrhythmia.
Though drugmakers have donated millions of pills to federal and state governments, it is not clear how many have even been used. Florida, for instance, is sitting on more than 980,000 unused doses from an April donation after just six hospitals put in requests for the drug.
This was a travesty, causing mistrust of the public health experts at a time when we needed them them most. It’s one of the worst things he’s done.
Oh, and by the way:
Public health experts worry the White House will approve the first promising coronavirus vaccine candidate — without proof that it works.
That would be so bad I can’t even fathom the harm it would cause. There’s already a substantial anti-vax contingent. Imagine if people think Donald Trump is out there selling a vaccine as a snake oil cure. And you really can’t blame them if they do. Who can we trust after what the government died with that Hydroxychloroquine nonsense?
They all went along with it, knowing that it was Laura Ingraham/Dr Oz fueled bullshit designed to help Trump’s political standing and nothing more. It enabled him to go on national TV and demand ht his scientists look into injecting household disinfectant to “clean the lungs” because he is so narcissistic that he actually believes that he understands science and has big ideas nobody’s every thought of.
He is very, very dumb and his ignorance costs lives and money because people don’t stand up to him when he takes these very, very dumb actions.
Ian Millhiser at Vox explains the Supreme Court decision today recognizing the rights of LGBTQ citizens. It’s big.
Gorsuch is a vocal proponent of “textualism,” the belief that the meaning of a law turns on its words alone, not on the intentions of the law’s drafters. And Bostock forced Gorsuch to decide between his own conservative politics and following the broad language of a landmark civil rights law. Gorsuch didn’t simply honor his textualist approach in Bostock, he wrote the majority opinion.
In Bostock, the Court considered Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids employment discrimination that occurs “because of [an employee’s] race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Though there is little doubt that the people who drafted this law in 1964 did not believe they were enacting a ban on LGBTQ discrimination, the thrust of Gorsuch’s opinion is that the expectations of lawmakers in 1964 simply does not matter.
Only the text of Title VII matters. And, as Bostock explains at length, that text clearly prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Gorsuch lays out why in just five crisp sentences on the first page of his majority opinion:
In Title VII, Congress outlawed discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.
Remarkably, Bostock is a 6-3 opinion. Both Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, and Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative appointed by President George W. Bush, joined the majority. Roberts joined Gorsuch’s opinion in full and did not write a separate opinion. Neither man has shown much sympathy for LGBTQ rights plaintiffs in the past.
But the sheer force of the plaintiffs’ textual arguments in Bostock appears to have weighed heavily on both men. At the very least, Bostock suggests that this conservative Supreme Court can follow the clear text of a law, even when that reading points in a liberal direction.
This is a great day. It means that it’s finally clear that LGBTQ people are a protected class under Title VII and can’t be fired simply for being LGBTQ. I guess I will never understand why anyone believes they should have the right to do that but today the conservative Supreme Court made clear that they don’t.
This shows the power of well written legislation going forward. If Gorsuch and Roberts can be persuaded to go against their own personal beliefs because the law must be interpreted as written then it’s up to Democrats to write the laws as clearly as possible and embed universal values in the words themselves.
What a picture. What a statement.
It is the photograph that has captured a hopeful, valiant, precise moment in a divided Britain — a powerfully built Black Lives Matter protester, a personal trainer and a grandfather, hoisting an injured far-right demonstrator onto his shoulder to rescue him from a violent scrum near Waterloo Bridge.
From Saturday’s melee in central London emerged Patrick Hutchinson, a black Briton, hailed as savior, carrying a white man, with shaved head and cut-off jeans, onto his shoulders in a fireman’s lift.
The British tabloids, even the right-wing ones, called Hutchinson a “hero,” and accolades from politicians and ordinary folk poured forth on social media. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said, “Patrick Hutchinson’s instincts in that moment represent the best of us.”
On his Instagram account, Hutchinson wrote, “We saved a life today.”
It’s a beautiful thing. This man makes every one of those sniveling white supremacists look like the small men they are. And I’m not talking about their physical countenance. I’m talking about their characters.
He’s a hero because he respects human life — even the lives of those who have no respect for his.
Update:
Ain’t it the truth … damn.