If you happened to hear Trump earlier today bragging about his fabulous COVID response, demanding credit for the vaccine rollout, you might want to look at this video from the New York Times. It’s about the suffering that monster still refuses to acknowledge (as he continues to promote people ignoring and making the pandemic last much longer than it needs to.)
500,000 dead in one year, a vast majority of whom didn’t have to die if the government would have simply done what had to be done instead of stroking the ego of a fool who only cares about his election campaign.
A far-right Facebook group that spans the U.K. and the U.S. recently erupted in alarm when a user posted, “There are people donating blood after being shot up with the covid crap. This terrifies me.” A wave of comments followed, all reflecting various degrees of deluded, conspiratorial thinking about shots that we know to be safe and effective.
“Isn’t there a rule not to??” one intoned. “Are people that stupid to donate blood after getting a shot?”
“Well, I will never get a blood transfusion ever now,” another declared. “Their blood has the death shot in it! No thank you!”
It took about an hour for a swastika to crop up. Covered partially by a face mask, the image was captioned, “It’s for your safety.”
Nathan Savoy, a 34-year-old from Houston, responded on a separate thread in the same group: “In the future ONLY the vaccinated will be able to give blood. Think I am joking? Just watch.”
While Savoy later told The Daily Beast his “comment was meant to be tongue-in-cheek,” he said he was concerned about receiving a blood transfusion from someone who had received the vaccine. “We know the health risk of COVID pretty well now,” he said. “We don’t know those from the vaccine. It might be minimal. However, unknowns rank higher in my risk ranking.”
Savoy also mentioned he “does not plan on getting any of the COVID treatments.”
While there are typically deferral periods for donating blood after receiving a vaccination for diseases like rubella, measles, and chicken pox, in most cases there is no such period for people who received the COVID-19 vaccine as long as they are feeling well. As a precaution when donating, potential donors must provide their vaccine manufacturer’s name. If they cannot, they are instructed to wait two weeks before donating.
Regardless, anti-vaxxers believe without evidence that the lack of a deferral period—and in some more extreme cases, allowing the vaccinated to donate blood at all—is a backdoor to genetic modification. In what appears to be the latest offshoot of the Great Reset conspiracy theory, which holds that global elites are manipulating the pandemic for twisted, totalitarian ends, these extremists claim vaccinated people donating blood might lead to the downfall of civilization as we know it.
CHARLEVOIX, CANADA – JUNE 9: In this photo provided by the German Government Press Office (BPA), German Chancellor Angela Merkel deliberates with US president Donald Trump on the sidelines of the official agenda on the second day of the G7 summit on June 9, 2018 in Charlevoix, Canada. Also pictured are (L-R) Larry Kudlow, director of the US National Economic Council, Theresa May, UK prime minister, Emmanuel Macron, French president, Angela Merkel, Yasutoshi Nishimura, Japanese deputy chief cabinet secretary, Shinzo Abe, Japan prime minister, Kazuyuki Yamazaki, Japanese senior deputy minister for foreign affairs, John Bolton, US national security adviser, and Donald Trump. Canada are hosting the leaders of the UK, Italy, the US, France, Germany and Japan for the two day summit. (Photo by Jesco Denzel /Bundesregierung via Getty Images)
This piece in the Washington Post addresses the big question when it comes to foreign policy and national security: is the US a rogue super power? As far as the rest of the world is concerned the jury is still out:
For President Biden and his circle, a low point in America’s global standing under President Donald Trump came when he blew up a meeting of U.S. allies in 2018, accusing close partners of “robbing” the United States and hurling insults at his Canadian host.
So it was no accident that Biden’s push to reclaim American leadership in recent days has pointedly included a starring role for Canada, as the new administration seeks to woo an array of allies with a message that “America is back.”
But it’s increasingly clear that Biden cannot simply sweep up the broken diplomatic china and restore the world order that reigned when he was vice president.There is one simple reason: Allies know Trumpism could always come back, either in a 2024 bid by Trump himself or from another presidential hopeful offering a similar pitch.
That has left friends and foes alike with doubts about the value of any new American commitments, given the country’s deep political divide and the possibility that the pendulum could swing back in four years. Allies have begun hedging their bets, musing about a Europe-only security force and exploring wider trade with China.
That’s even true for America’s closest allies, like Great Britain. “The Bidenites say with good reason that they recognize that ‘not politics as usual’ was the theme of the election in the past few years,” Karen Pierce, Britain’s ambassador to the United States, said. “It is a theme that they know they’re going to have to contend with.”
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said “there’s no doubt” that foreign leaders now wonder about America’s reliability, given the country’s divisions and the persistence of support for Trump.
Trump officially ended the American Century and the Pax Americana, to the extent either of those things ever existed. And I don’t think it’s possible or desirable to return to that arrangement. But the world is still a very complicated place and it’s evolving in unpredictable ways as the central, overriding global challenge is climate change. Everything has to be focused on cooperation not confrontation.
The US still has the worlds biggest military and arsenal and it’s economy is huge so it’s going to be a major player. But we are no longer trustworthy and the world is going to have a hard time believing that we are responsible actors as long as our politics remains batshit crazy. I am surprised that we haven’t seen adversaries and allies alike arming up. That’s the usual response to a military power going crazy. Maybe the rest of the world was just holding back to see if we could pull ourselves together. Trump’s cult completely taking over the GOP and seemingly impervious to reality, isn’t a good sign.
This is a perfect example of Republican shamelessness, as illustrated by a so-called moderate who is retiring and was supposed to be someone who would speak truth to power:
Confronted with the hypocrisy of him saying that passing Covid relief through reconciliation would "poison the well of bipartisanship" even though he voted to pass Trump's tax cuts and ACA repeal through reconciliation, Rob Portman really has no defense pic.twitter.com/EvBfaN9Eu5
See? Democrats have to be “bipartisan” but Republicans don’t because their issues are not bipartisan issues and so … whatever. It’s gibberish. This is Lucy and the football stuff and he knows it. They came to Biden with 600 million opening ante which proved they were not even remotely serious. They brought along at least five Senators who were never in a million years going to help Democrats break a filibuster unless they passed a Republican bill (probably including some tax cuts for the rich) and then they probably wouldn’t have voted for it anyway. It was designed to waste time and give them the opportunity to say that Biden lied when he said he wanted to unify the country.
Portman knows all this. He isn’t stupid. He is shameless.
The main CPAC stage where Republicans and other conservatives are gathering this weekend in Florida looks eerily similar to an old Nazi symbol … something that’s causing utter outrage.
Somebody pointed out the design, noting the stage appears to be shaped like an emblem the Nazis proudly flashed during WWII. And no, it’s not the swastika that everyone knows … but it is an offshoot of it, one that’s less known but still as hateful.
The symbol is called Odal rune, and it dates back to ancient Germanic languages. Its rough English translation is heritage, inheritance or inherited state. Yeah, pretty Nazi-ish.
If these people didn’t traffic so much with Nazis and act like a bunch of fascists, it wouldn’t be so easy to believe that someone would do this.
Whenever I see one of those USA-1 tags on a muscle car, I wonder how many other countries the owner has visited. In puffing out our chests at events like CPAC and bragging about American greatness it is best not to look too closely at it without the beer glasses. Up close the blemishes appear.
National Public Radio ran a series in 2014 on America’s new debtors’ prisons. “Guilty And Charged” examined “an explosion in the use of fees charged to criminal defendants across the country, which has created a system of justice that targets the poor.” This is the land of opportunity where anyone can get ahead. Unless you start out behind.
The Washington Post’s Editorial Board last week looked at another blemish in an American legal system that treats the better-off one way and the poor another. It is true that in criminal cases a litigant is guaranteed legal representation. At public cost, if necessary. But in civil cases, the system is less uniform across the country, and “poverty-stricken litigants in noncriminal cases routinely face life-shattering outcomes, including jail time, without ever seeing a lawyer or receiving basic legal advice,” the Post explains:
Most European countries have long-standing rules granting a right to counsel to litigants in property and monetary cases, as well as ones in which life and liberty hang in the balance. In England, Parliament acted more than 500 years ago to ensure that paupers would be provided lawyers when suing in King Henry VII’s courts; that right found its way into laws in some of the original 13 colonies.
In today’s United States, lawmakers and judges have carved out a hodgepodge, varying wildly from state to state and even by locality, under which certain at-risk individuals may qualify for court-appointed counsel in some types of civil matters. In most states, for instance, that’s the case when authorities seek to remove children permanently from their parents and send them to foster care, owing to alleged neglect or abuse. In a handful of big cities, other laws enacted in recent years grant a right to counsel to tenants facing eviction, an event that often triggers a cascade of other problems, such as homelessness.
Far more often, however, poor people unversed in the law are on their own when states have not specified a right to counsel and judges cannot or will not provide one. That produces appalling results across a range of legal disputes.
It is “a profound injustice” that when facing the U.S. legal system millions of Americans find the odds stacked against them. They stand alone against a convoluted, Dickensian system of rules and procedures that to the unrepresented might as well be The Star Chamber or a court of Oyer and Terminer.
In about half the states someone might be “stripped of their right to rear or even see their own children” or fail to win court protection from domestic violence or end up in prison over failure to make child support payments. Renters face eviction and the elderly face exploitation often without legal counsel to defend their interests. It should not take a public scandal to focus enough attention to remedy these inequities, but often it does, the Post observes.
A “backwoods Southern lawyer” complained to me last week it is easier to get to the moon than to get a driver’s license reinstated after a DUI or failure to pay court fees. In rural America where there is no public transportation, denial of a driver’s license is denial of a job.
Despite a state constitutional amendment, graduates of Florida’s penal system still find their voting rights denied over failure to pay fees the state itself often cannot enumerate.
As the country struggles to beat back the coronavirus pandemic, existing disparities come into sharper relief (The Guardian):
Latino and Black Americans continue to be vaccinated against Covid at the lowest rate despite political promises to redress inequalities, new analysis reveals.
Only 4.6% of Latinos and 5.7% of Black Americans have so far received a vaccine dose, compared with 11.3% of white Americans and 10.5% of Asian Americans, according to analysis by APM Research Lab shared exclusively with the Guardian.
Pacific Islanders have the highest inoculation rate, according to the limited data available, with 16.3% (about one in six) already having received at least one dose. Maryland has vaccinated 43.4% of this population – the highest reported proportion of any community in any state.
The second-highest rate is among Indigenous Americans, with 12.8% (one in eight) already having received at least one jab.
Despite some progress, the available state health data clearly suggests that access to the Covid vaccines – just like testing and economic aid – is disproportionately low for Latino and Black Americans, the two largest minority communities in the US.
Kay: You know how naïve you sound? Presidents and Senators don’t have men killed.
Michael: Oh. Who’s being naïve, Kay?
— from The Godfather
While it is based on a true story and billed as a “biopic”, Shaka King’s new film Judas and the Black Messiah feels more akin to fictional early 70s conspiracy thrillers like The Conversation, The Parallax View or Three Days ofthe Condor. Those three films (released in proximity of the Watergate break-in scandal and President Richard Nixon’s consequent resignation) are permeated by an atmosphere of paranoia, distrust and betrayal that mirrors the climate of the Nixon era. That is not to imply Judas and the Black Messiah is made up from whole cloth. From a recent Democracy Now broadcast:
[Host Amy Goodman] Newly unearthed documents have shed new light on the FBI’s role in the murder of the 21-year-old Black Panther leader Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969, when Chicago police raided Hampton’s apartment and shot and killed him in his bed, along with fellow Black Panther leader Mark Clark. Authorities initially claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant for weapons, but evidence later emerged that told a very different story: The FBI, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and the Chicago police had conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton. FBI memos and reports obtained by historian and writer Aaron Leonard now show that senior FBI officials played key roles in planning the raid and the subsequent cover-up. “It was approved at the highest level,” says attorney Jeff Haas.
Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies conspiring to assassinate an American citizen as he slept in his apartment? It happened. Haas, a founding member of the People’s Law Office in Chicago and one of the lead lawyers in the (posthumous) Fred Hampton civil rights case elaborated to host Amy Goodman (from the same broadcast):
But what [documents] showed was that [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover, [director of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division William] Sullivan and [head of the Extremist Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division George] Moore were following Roy Mitchell, a special agent in charge, very closely with regard to [FBI informant Bill] O’Neal. And they were complimenting him and rewarding him from the moment he gave the information and the floor plan [for Fred Hampton’s apartment] to special agent Mitchell. They were congratulating Mitchell on what a wonderful job he did with this informant. Of course, Mitchell got the floor plan, gave it to Hanrahan’s [Chicago] police, and that’s what led to the raid. The floor plan even showed the bed where Hampton and Johnson would be sleeping.
So, we knew much of this. We knew O’Neal had gotten a bonus. We never knew Mitchell got a bonus. And we never knew that Hoover and Sullivan and Moore were starting to watch this in November, 10 days before it happened. They were monitoring exactly what went on. And so it was approved at the highest level. And during the trial, we had sought to go up to Sullivan and Moore and Hoover, but the judge wouldn’t allow us. And we thought perhaps even John Mitchell and Richard Nixon were involved. We didn’t have these documents, so we couldn’t uncover that. This also shows that after the raid, the head of the FBI in Chicago met with and congratulated the informant, O’Neal, thanked him for his information, which led to the success of the raid.
Possible direct involvement by the White House certainly qualifies as the “highest level”. It is also interesting that an “Extremist Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division” existed in 1969 to keep close watch on the Panthers and other organizations that shared what present-day Fox primetime hosts might sneeringly refer to as “radical extremist socialist agendas” (BTW if such a special section still exists…where was their vigilance this past January 6th?).
That is a lot to unpack; much less in a 2-hour film. Perhaps wisely, writer-director King and co-writers Will Berson, Kenneth Lucas and Keith Lucas focus less on the complex political machinations and more on the personal aspects of the story.
More specifically, the filmmakers construct a dual narrative that shows how the life paths of charismatic Marxist revolutionary Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) and the man who would ultimately play “Judas” to his “black messiah”, Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) converged. There isn’t much backstory offered explaining Hampton’s rapid transformation from aspiring law student who joined the NAACP in the mid-60s to founder of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers in 1968; but then again, considering that he was dead and gone by age 21, his historical impact seems all the more remarkable.
On the other hand, O’Neal (who was one year younger than Hampton) is a man with less lofty ideals and negligible passion for politics. He is a career criminal whose luck runs out when he gets nailed for a felony beef after driving a stolen car across state lines. The arresting officer is FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) who offers O’Neal a way out: infiltrate the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, become an FBI informant, and win fabulous prizes (like having his felony charges disappear). O’Neal accepts the deal.
O’Neal ingratiates himself with Hampton, to the point where he becomes a member of the Chairman’s trusted inner circle. Along the way, the filmmakers offer a Cliff’s Notes summary of Hampton’s brief but productive tenure as head of the Chicago Panthers; his implementation of a program providing free breakfasts for schoolchildren, establishment of a free clinic, and (most impressively) mediating a peace treaty between long-time rival Chicago street gangs (ultimately leading to formation of the original multiracial “Rainbow Coalition”).
Ironically, it’s not so much what Hampton “does” that matters one way or the other to FBI director Hoover (Martin Sheen) and the rest of the posse out to “neutralize” the threat (perceived or otherwise) Hampton represents to the status quo, but rather what he says…which is at times incendiary and what some might even call seditious (Hoover is on record declaring the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”).
Just months before his death Hampton is arrested for (of all things) stealing $70 worth of candy. He is convicted, but the charges are overturned. There were several police raids on the Black Panthers’ HQ the same year, although the filmmakers distill them into one shootout incident. Clearly, the authorities were circling their prey, culminating in the fateful late-night raid in December of 1969 that left Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clarke dead and several people wounded. The reenactment of the incident is harrowing and affecting.
Ballistic evidence revealed one shot fired by the Panthers…and 100 (one hundred) shots fired by the police. Maybe it’s just me, but that sounds more like a police “assault” than a police “raid”. One of the people in the apartment that night was Hampton’s eight-month pregnant girlfriend Deborah Johnson (wonderfully played in the film by Dominique Fishback, who was a standout in the HBO series The Deuce). No matter how you may view Hampton’s place in history (hero or villain) the circumstances of his demise should dismay anyone familiar with the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which says (among other things)
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Judas and the Black Messiah is not a definitive biopic but does convey that what happened to Fred Hampton was an American tragedy…sadly, one that continues to occur to this day.
We have been blessed without any Trump speeches since his Insurrectionist call to arms on January 6th. It must have been tough. There is no celebrity on earth who needs the love of his fans more than Donald Trump. But he’s about to make his big comeback. And it’s going to be lit:
With each speech, we approach the real reason everyone’s here: former President DONALD TRUMP’S Sunday appearance, in which he will formally pronounce himself party kingmaker and take aim at his enemies.
Advisers to Trump say his hit list changes daily. But typically what he says privately, he says on stage. And he’s not just griping about the usual suspects (MITCH MCCONNELL, LIZ CHENEY and NIKKI HALEY).
Three people close to Trump tell me that he’s stewing anew over KEVIN MCCARTHY. It’s become so frequent that his advisers think the House minority leader may be in for a public reprimand. That’s even after the powwow at Mar-a-Lago where McCarthy tried to patch things up after he denounced Trump for the violence on Jan. 6.
The reason for Trump’s displeasure: an emboldened Cheney.
Each time Cheney criticizes Trump from her leadership post as the No. 3 House Republican, he’s reminded that it was McCarthy who pleaded with his conference to keep her on as chair — despite her vote to impeach Trump. The latest trigger came Wednesday, when Cheney said at a press conference that Trump should not lead the party going forward while McCarthy awkwardly stood by.
We’ll see whether McCarthycan get to Trump before his speech Sunday. He seems to already be trying to work his way back into Trump’s good graces. On Thursday, McCarthy took a swipe at Cheney on Fox News, suggesting that she supports cancel culture.
Trump signaled Friday that he’s ready to tangle in McCarthy’s conference, endorsing Rep. ANTHONY GONZALEZ’S (R-Ohio) primary challenger, MAX MILLER, a former aide to the president. Gonzalez voted for impeachment.
Despite the tensions, a Trump aide said he plans to downplay the extent of the rift in his CPAC speech by dismissing the GOP establishment altogether. “The only divide in the Republican Party is between the grassroots and a half a dozen Beltway insiders,” he’s expected to say.
I love all these people talking about “which lane” all the 2024 candidates will be running in — Trump-ultra, Trump-lite etc. There is only one lane. And it belongs to Donald Trump. If he wants it has it. And he wants it. The man lives for revenge. And unless he keels over before then, he will be the 2024 nominee and he will destroy anyone who tries to run against him in a primary.
NEW: Some QAnon believers and Trump supporters are now cheering on the military coup in Myanmar, hoping it will happen here. pic.twitter.com/nfPapJaZRF
