A children’s book about a lion raised by two men has been banned in Florida because right-wing activists suspect the men might be gay – despite nothing in the book suggesting they have any romantic relationship, according to a report.
The Florida Department of Education released new information about books that were banned or temporarily removed pending investigation in various county school systems as part of the state’s new laws making it easier to challenge material in a school library, reported the Tallahassee Democrat. One of the books was “Christian, the Hugging Lion.”
According to the report, schools in Manatee County, a conservative community just south of Tampa, withdrew the book that’s based on the true story about a pair of men who raise a lion in their London apartment, then are lovingly remembered by the animal when they go to Africa to see him years later.
Nothing in the book indicates the two men are in a same-sex relationship — but activists speculated that they might be, which was enough for a complaint about the book.
As the report notes, “Christian, the Hugging Lion” was written by the same authors who wrote “And Tango Makes Three,” a book about a pair of male penguins who raise a family. That book is also restricted in some Florida schools, and the authors have filed a federal lawsuit against Florida and a county school board.
This is only the latest in a series of bans and restrictions on content in schools being pushed in Florida. Last month, state laws prompted a school system in Hillsborough County to heavily redact the works of William Shakespeare, teaching only excerpts of his plays.
I don’t understand why anyone would think people this obsessed wouldn’t work to overturn gay marriage. They don’t even want their kids contemplating that two people of the same sex might live together much less be married. Watch out room mates! They’re coming for you too!
Seriously, thinking little kids must be protected from the true story that two men who raised a lion and set it free is just sick. All the kids would see is two nice men who loved an animal and an animal who loved them back. The horror.
Republicans have openly admitted that their efforts to impeach President Joe Biden — which will begin in earnest this week as House members return to DC from summer break — are in bad faith. They don’t just want to tarnish Biden. They want to tarnish the impeachment process itself.
As the GOP has become increasingly authoritarian and anti-democracy, Republicans have become increasingly committed to undermining and mocking forms of democratic accountability. A nakedly partisan and clownish impeachment is useful because it signals to voters that all impeachments are clown shows, and all impeachments are partisan. That exculpates former President Donald Trump and delegitimizes resistance to him should he win the presidency again.
It’s absolutely the case that they are doing this for Trump because he has demanded it. That goes without saying. But since they are all bent on destroying democracy and the constitutional order, de-legitimizing the impeachment process is a no brainer. If they have the power (meaning a 2/3 Senate majority) they will remove any Democratic president for whatever trumped up charges they come up with. If they don’t have the power they will use it as yet another of their patented performance art projects. Impeachment will be devalued so that even if Democrats have the evidence and the power to remove, it will be seen as illegitimate. Win win for the bad guys.
STEVE HILTON (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): I mean, of course it’s laughable, the Biden aspect. Almost everything with Biden is laughable. But it’s really serious, it’s really infuriating, Harris. Because we never had what I and many others called for, which is a completely objective, independent assessment of the COVID policies that were implemented to see what worked and didn’t. We never had that. And so as a result we are now back to these absurd, preposterous kind of witchcraft and voodoo masquerading as public health from these tin-pot fascists and their authoritarianism, exactly as Rand Paul was talking about. We have to resist this. We have to resist it at every level, as J.D. Vance is doing at the federal level, we have to resist this at the state level, the local level, the individual level. We cannot let them go back to this madness.
Here’s more:
Uhm, toddlers can have total hysterics when you try to put their pants on or wash their hands. They’re toddlers. So are these right wingers who are still having tantrums over wearing masks.
And they are wrong about the efficacy of wearing them. This from the NY Times provides the current thinking on mask wearing:
“I tend to say, if you’re going to go out, make sure you have a mask in your car, a couple masks at home or at work, so you always have something available to put on,” said Andrew Pekosz, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Here’s a refresher on where, when and how to mask.
When should you wear a mask inside?
Everyone’s risk tolerance varies, Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, said. But particularly if you are 65 or older, have an underlying condition that makes you more vulnerable to severe disease or are pregnant, he recommends wearing a mask whenever you are in a relatively confined, crowded indoor space. That can include stores, offices and public transportation.
“Certainly every time you add another person to the room, particularly people who are within three to five feet of you, that increases your chance of getting infected, exponentially,” Dr. Pekosz added.
Time matters, too: Darting in and out of a packed grocery store is less risky than working all day in a busy office, for example. Ten minutes is a good marker to keep in mind, Dr. Pekosz said. If you’re headed somewhere indoors for longer than that, you may want to consider putting on a mask beforehand.
Which type of mask should you wear?
Dr. Marr recommends N95, KN95 or KF94 masks, all of which filter out over 90 percent of virus particles, she said, making them far more effective than surgical or cloth masks at reducing your chance of getting infected with Covid. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a list of resources for where to find free N95s.
The experts said that a mask should fit snugly across your face and cover both your nose and mouth; wearing a mask below your nose will do very little to shield you from the virus.
A high-quality mask “does wonders in terms of protecting you from getting infected, but you have to wear it the right way,” Dr. Pekosz said. “If you don’t crimp the metal thing around your nose, if it’s loose around you, then you’re probably breathing around the mask, not through the mask. And that is not going to protect you.”
Some experts estimate that you can use a mask for a total of about 40 hours before it’s time to replace it. If you notice fraying, creases, new holes or dirt on your mask, you should replace it before then, Dr. Marr said. If your mask is uncomfortable, or if you feel like it’s moving too much across your face, Dr. Marr recommends trying different brands to find the best fit.
Do you need to mask after being exposed?
If you get the dreaded text that someone you recently spent time with has tested positive for Covid, the C.D.C. recommends putting on a high-quality mask as soon as possible, and keeping it on for 10 full days when you’re around other people. Even if you test negative, the agency says you should still wear a mask in public indoor settings. It can take several days for people to develop symptoms, Dr. Pekosz said, and testing too early can lead to false negatives.
Is one-way masking effective?
Even if you’re the only person wearing one on the subway or in your office, a high-quality mask can still meaningfully reduce your risk of getting infected. “You’re going to be pretty well protected,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of global health and infectious diseases at Stanford Medicine, because you’re guarding your face from the particles around you.
There are additional ways to build up your defenses against the virus: sanitizing your hands before touching your face, social distancing from others and getting an updated booster shot when the new vaccines are available.
While many people are exhausted by this long pandemic, Dr. Maldonado stressed it’s important to remember that we have tools to reduce our risk. “Masks work, period,” she said. “Whether you choose to use them or not is a different matter. But they definitely work.”
Of course they do. And since we are now in “every man for himself” territory, all we can do is try to protect ourselves and our loved ones. If we had a healthy society we’d gratefully embrace the idea that we have the means to protect all vulnerable people but that’s not who we are so we just have to do what we can.
He is currently in business with Saudi Arabia’s LIV golf, happy to whitewash their past as he did when he proclaimed MBS innocent of ordering the death and dismemberment of Jamaal Kashoggi. His first trip as president was to genuflect to their king. And his son-in-law delivered so much to the Saudi government while he was in the White House that they gave him 2 billion dollars in thanks immediately upon leaving office.
Also this, when he called in to a radio station on the morning of 9/11 and bragged about how he now had the tallest building in Manhattan, which was, naturally, a lie:
“I mean, 40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan. And it was actually – before the World Trade Center – was the tallest. And then when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest, and now it’s the tallest.”
As multiple fact checks later pointed out, this was not true. The Wall Street building had not been the tallest building in lower Manhattan in the 1970s, when the Twin Towers were constructed, nor was it the tallest in the area after 2001.
By the time of Mr Trump’s interview, both buildings of the World Trade Center had collapsed after planes hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists had smashed into them. Two other planes had also crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone onboard. In total, nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks.
But Mr Trump’s attention was elsewhere. Later in the interview, he complained about the closing of the New York Stock Exchange.
“I was so disappointed when they closed the stock exchange, but of course, at some point, you have no choice,” the real estate mogul said. “You want to just say, ‘The hell with it, you’re going forward, nothing’s gonna change.’ But the fact is, something has changed very dramatically.”
He’s the last person who should ever talk about 9/11. It’s offensive.
On Sunday night Donald Trump threw down the gauntlet at the feet of Rupert Murdoch and his sons, Joe Biden and the “WSJ heads.” He posted this cri de guerre on his social media platform Truth Social:
In a phony and probably rigged Wall Street Journal poll, coming out of nowhere to soften the mental incompetence blow that is so obvious with Crooked Joe Biden, they ask about my age and mentality. Where did that come from? A few years ago I was the only one to agree to a mental acuity test, & ACED IT. Now that the Globalists at Fox & the WSJ have failed to push their 3rd tier candidate to success, they do this. Well, I hereby challenge Rupert Murdoch & Sons, Biden, WSJ heads, to acuity tests!
He added:
I will name the place and the test, and it will be a tough one. Nobody will come even close to me! We can also throw some physical activity into it. I just won the Senior Club Championship at a big golf club, with many very good players. To do so you need strength, accuracy, touch and, above all, mental toughness. Ask Bret Baier (Fox), a very good golfer. The Wall Street Journal & Fox are damaged goods after their failed DeSanctimonious push & stupid $780,000,000 “settlement.” MORONS!!!
That’s just a little bit over the top even for him, don’t you think? All the WSJ did was publish a poll question asking Biden and Trump were too old to be president. His own pollster was a partner in the poll so he should probably take it up with him. And despite the fact that he’s 77 years old and would be 78 when he re-assumes the presidency should he win in 2024, he seems to think that’s off limits because he “aced” the The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test given to him some years ago by his favorite White House doctor Ronny Jackson.
The test is designed to track cognitive changes over time. It’s not an “acuity” test or an IQ test but Trump has gone back to it again and again as proof of his mental fitness. In the famous interview in which he bragged that he had been able to remember a string of words he explained that it was actually quite difficult:
Trump portraying passing a cognitive test at the hospital like he just discovered the theory of relativity is completely beyond parody pic.twitter.com/YyYwu3yXik
No normal person would make such a bit deal out of that test because it’s obvious to anyone with a brain that it’s just a memory test that many elderly people take to see if they may have signs of dementia. He acts as though he just scored 1600 on the SAT (which, by the way, he reportedly paid someone to take for him.) Or maybe he thinks the MoCA is actually MENSA?
But this incessant reminder that he was able to take this very simple test and that all the doctors were shocked because nobody ever does that well is just … pathetic. And it’s very telling. It’s one thing to just assert that you are a very stable genius, as preposterous as that is, but it’s quite another to brag about passing a very rudimentary memory test over and over and over again.
And it is rudimentary.
Trump about the cognitive test he took: "… The first few questions are easy, but I'll bet you couldn't even answer the last five questions. I'll bet you couldn't, they get very hard, the last five questions."
He knows that he’s not all that bright and it drives him crazy. Back in July of 2022 he told his rally crowd:
“I said ‘Ronnie, I don’t like when people call me stupid. I have great heritage, an uncle who was a great, great genius, a father who was a genius, they’re all geniuses, we had a lot of geniuses. I don’t like being called stupid. Is there a test I can take to prove to these radical left maniacs that I’m much smarter than them?
He’s worried. He’s been worried for years. And evidently he had heard talk that people might want to remove him for “incapacitation.” He gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation in which he claimed that “they” were trying to get him with an “Article 5” but “they don’t think about it now, the 25th Amendment. They don’t think about that now at all, they never mention the 25th. But they would never – any time I had a great idea they would mention –’25th Amendment, there’s something wrong with him.'”
If only “they ” had had the guts to do it.
He’s terrified of developing Alzheimer’s disease because his father had it. As the New York Times reported at the time of his “person, woman, man, camera TV” moment, he said, “…I have, like, a good memory, because I’m cognitively there. Now, Joe should take that test, because something’s going on and, and, I say this with respect. I mean — going to probably happen to all of us, right? You know? It’s going to happen.”
According to his niece Mary Trump’s book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” Trump derided his father when he was ill with Alzheimer’s — and took full advantage of it by coercing him into changing the will in Donald’s favor. Mary Trump has taped interviews with Trump’s sister who said, “Dad was in dementia…I show it to [husband]John, and he says, ‘Holy s–t.’ It was basically taking the whole estate and giving it to Donald.” She also said that Trump “has no principles” and “you can’t trust him,” which is stating the obvious.
There were lawsuits over Fred Trump’s will and the Washington Post reported that Donald testified in a deposition that he didn’t know his father had dementia and that he believed he was “very, very sharp.” That is certainly a lie. He’d been in cognitive decline for years by that point.
It’s quite obvious that Trump is clinging to that test as a way to reassure himself that he’s not impaired. But, of course, he is and on some level he knows it. He may not have dementia but he’s got so many other psychological defects that it hardly matters. After all, the man has bought himself two felony indictments for the simple reason that he couldn’t admit that he lost.
As his niece Mary Trump said, “his talking about the dementia test the way he’s talking about it is failing the dementia test.”. And he fails it again every time he talks about it. He just can’t seem to stop himself.
The FB post below deserves a wider audience. Sara Robinson is a futurist friend who’s written for Orcinus with David Neiwert and for America’s Future and AlterNet. She commented a few weeks ago on Vivek Ramaswamy’s plans for “revolution” in Washington, D.C.
Ramaswamy’s pitch is another riff on Republicans’ and the Heritage Foundation’s plan to “Schedule F” away the “administrative state” both by replacing tens of thousands of career civil servants with MAGA ideologues and by killing off entire agencies. Think of the Trump administration on steroids.
For the MAGA faithful who still believe their spray-tanned savior was cheated of his rightful kingship by the deep state, eliminating 75 percent of the federal workforce may hold retributive appeal. Robinson spells out what that really looks like out in so-called “real America.”
“The people who will be hurt most by the this are, of course, rural Republicans,” Robinson writes, in small towns already clinging to life supported by government presence:
Every last town with the lights still on is doing it with large amounts of either state or federal money. They’re the county seat — so they have the courts, the jail, the hospital, and the community college. There’s a military base, a dam, national lab, prison, or some other large piece of infrastructure. Or a state or national park nearby that draws in tourists and employees. They’re the port town on this part of the river or coast, built long ago and still maintained on ample public investment; or they’re fortuitously sited near the intersection of two interstates or railroads that funnel in traffic and money to support private business.
The props take a lot of forms, but the source is the same. Apart from a scant handful of places where the old factory or mine hasn’t yet been closed up and shipped abroad, we have yet to find a surviving small town that isn’t standing on an economic foundation of some kind of government investment.
A lot of conservatives listening to Ramaswamy hear him promising the death of the deep state — without realizing that what he’s really talking about is killing dozens or hundreds (or, in a base town, thousands) of the jobs that are the last thing sustaining their own local economies. If he gets his way, the last people in town with a college education and/or a middle-class wage will be forced to move on. Schools and hospitals will close. Real estate values will crash. And their town will just become another boarded-up, desiccating, depopulated blip on a county highway.
Unable to think past FOX-planted stereotypes, they think that “government jobs” are universally held by Those People — the non-white ones, the ones in the cities. It never seems to occur to them that it’s their own neighbors — the nurse at the county hospital, the state trooper, the guy who manages the local airport, the woman who runs the ranger station up at the state park, the fish-and-game guy, the farm bureau staffer, the sweet kid who teaches their son’s first-grade class — who are going to take it in the neck here as the money that funds their jobs dries up. And when they go, so does the tax base that literally keeps the streets paved and the lights on.
When they’re gone — well, to paraphrase one of their heroes, “you’re not gonna have a town any more.” They think they’re winning. But they’re the ones with the actual targets on their backs. Ramaswamy’s plan is their pathway to a future of destitution, drugs, and deaths of despair.
Think beyond negative partisanship for once, neighbors. Look over your shoulder into the mirror for the target the right stuck to your back.
Stop the handwringing, okay? Mehdi Hasan Sunday night addressed the press promotion of the “Biden’s too old” narrative. Meantime, President Joe Biden, 80, is out bicycling.
Tonight, in my monologue on @MSNBC, I gave 3 main reasons – political, historical, & psephological – for why folks shouldn't panic over polls showing Trump beating Biden, & Biden being too old to win.
Had a conversation just yesterday with a voter who brought up the “Biden’s too old” concern. Why? Because the media’s all aflutter with it and one thing Democrats are good at is self-doubt.
Listen, the next general (not just presidential) election is 14 months out. Between now and then much can happen, usually does, and probably will.
Yes, it’s important for Democrats to hold the White House. But it’s also important that they retain the Senate, take back the House, and regain strength in state legislatures where Republicans are running laboratories of autocracy.
I’m focused on keeping this lunatic out of North Carolina’s governor’s mansion. The irony is that however tight polls suggest that race looks today, it’s a long way to Tuesday, November 5, 2024. Between now and then, there is a lot of work to do.
Here’s what I don’t get: this administration’s reworking of global relationships is the biggest story in at least a generation in foreign affairs— probably more. Why on earth would you downplay that major story to focus on Biden’s well-earned weariness after an epic all-nighter? https://t.co/fSiGNUwmDl
But Democrats also say that based on 2023 so far, they see plenty of reason for optimism about their chances with voters.
An analysis from FiveThirtyEight found that in 38 special elections held so far this year, Democrats have outperformed the partisan lean — or the relative liberal or conservative history — of the areas where the races were held by an average of 10%, both romping in parts of the country that typically support the party while cutting down on GOP margins in red cities and counties, too.
For instance, the Democratic candidate in a Wisconsin State Assembly special election last month lost by just 7 points in an area where Republicans have a 22-point edge and where Trump beat Biden by almost 17 points in 2020.
In a New Hampshire special election in May for a state House seat, the Democrat won by 43 points, far beyond the party’s estimated 23-point edge in the district.
The data from FiveThirtyEight does not include regularly scheduled off-year elections, including the Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this year in which the liberal candidate, now-Justice Janet Protasiewicz, won by 11 points — in a state famous for its wafer-thin election margins.
“I think when you when you look at things like this, one special election doesn’t mean much on its own. But when you start to see real consistency, it can certainly become predictive of the next election cycle,” said Ben Nuckels, a Wisconsin Democratic strategist who consulted on Protasiewicz’s campaign.
For comparison, according to FiveThirtyEight, Democrats outperformed the weighted partisan lean by about 4% in special elections held between the 2018 midterms and the 2020 elections, when Biden won the White House by 4.5% but Democrats underperformed in House races.
Conversations with eight Democratic and Republican operatives in swing states show some repeated explanations for this success: the public’s general support for abortion access after the Supreme Court reversed the national guarantee for the procedure last year along with angst and anger over Trump’s comeback bid, given how divisive he remains — two factors which might even overcompensate for Biden’s sagging approval ratings.
“Republicans have not had a good election night since before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And, honestly, it seems like post-Roe Republicans couldn’t find their groove even if a DJ played their favorite song on repeat,” Nuckels said. “So I think Democrats are in a very good position here going forward.”
They did elect Glenn Youngkin in 2022 and created the myth that he’s the Great Whitebread Hope but other than that they haven’t done much of anything.
This does not mean that Biden is a shoo-on. But the negative politics associated with abortion policy and Trump goes a long way toward mitigating the age question. And the economic news is actually good and getting better.
But it’s going to be a pitched battle, don’t ever doubt it. Almost half the country has lost its collective mind.
