A Sense of Doubt blog post #2129 - The NewSpeak of Neo-Oceania - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2012.16
In the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the lexicologist character Syme discusses his editorial work on the latest edition of the Newspeak Dictionary:
We are living in Bizarro World where up is down, two is three, lose is win, fair is fraud, nasty is woman, and if you are not with me, you are against me.
It contains all the nightmare scenarios we always feared and yet it’s not taking over completely.
The Emperor has lost his clothes and people are starting to see him without his robes of glamour. And yet, too many are still bedazzled and ensorceled by his dog and pony denialism trick show. People want to believe, like a medium speaking to the dead to give people what they want, the words of solace from a dead loved one.
For too many, if Big Brother tells you that 2 + 2 = 5 then it does. Without question. It’s the blind loyalty and insane reality-denying belief that seems to baffling to those of who live in the real world and look up to see up and down to find down and know that women are smart and earn doctorates and are as worthy of our respect as any human. And we know that when we lose, we admit defeat, and when we win, we accept with some humility.
And so we have our theme for this week. I found all these cool graphics online for Newspeak and quotes and slogans from Orwell’s 1984, which I should really re-read. I am not even sure if I still have a paper copy of it. I just checked. The Kindle edition is $16.99 because of how many schools still use it as a text. But it’s free with Kindle Unlimited. I think I may hunt for my paper copy. Though the audio book is free on Audible Plus!
I am sure I am not the first writer – online or otherwise – to compare the current deluge or misinformation and disinformation to the Newspeak of Oceania in Orwell’s signature dystopian novel 1984. Not a big stretch because the purveyors of misinformation beseech to be a “goodthinker” because “good thinking” is double plus good and bad thinking is double plus ungood and will eventually not exist in consciousness. The parallels here are frightening to behold.
Does it sound too cool to call these purveyors of the false “misinformationauts”? Because I like that sounds, and it’s play on astronauts or argonauts... any naut is a traveler, naut for nautical. Maybe misinformationauts is a good name for them because I want to see them travel away fom here.
As usual, or at least usual for lately, the Weekly Hodge Podge is full of the chicanery from the Trump Campaign and all his dupes and cronies, all those currying favor, or remaining silent to stay in his good graces. It’s nauseating. So, I tried to temper the nausea with some other stories, like this first one about Cher’s efforts to save the last gorilla in Thailand. And stories at the end with a smiling hippo (underwater) and possibly (maybe) a new species of whale as well as some eerie pictures of a “slick” underground bunker.
These stories are meant to sandwich in the upsetting, outrage producing and disgusting nausea of all the other stories of the week.
I also added a story for the second time that details how the “Majority Leader” of the Senate is not a position stipulated by Constitutional Law; it’s simply a custom. I may start posting it once a week for the next month just to keep in the forefront of my mind.
Now that the Electoral College votes have been tallied and all states have certified, and so the election is over, the news of election stuff has been dropped to much lower in the post. The pandemic is up first because it’s far more of an urgent and desperate situation. Remember Trump saying how the liberal media cabal would not talk about Covid anymore starting November 4th? We knew that was wrong then, and we know it’s wrong now. News media outlets, especially respectable ones, were not reporting on the pandemic to stick it to Trump, they reported because it’s the greatest pandemic in 100 years and Trump has failed miserably to do much at all about it, other than to say “it is what it is” when his “one day it will disappear like a miracle” continued to not be true.
Right now, over 3,000 Americans are dying every day due to COVID-19. The novel coronavirus sars-cov-2 and the COVID-19 infection caused by the virus is the leading cause of death in the United States on a daily basis, beating cancer and heart disease. Though COVID-19 lags in total deaths for the year behind the stats for 2018 for heart disease (655,381) and cancer (599,274) according to CDC fast facts - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
It has far out stripped influenza deaths (59,120) and let us not forget that one cannot “catch” heart disease or even cancer in the way one is infected with a contagious virus.
And then, there’s the scramble of misinformationauts to hide and deny the truth as evidenced by the recent attack on Rebekah Jones in Florida by the police because she was accused of sending an email to state employees. Jones had been fired in May when she refused to manipulate Covid-19 data. She now runs her own web site to report the truth of the status of the virus in Florida because the Republican governor’s poor actions have made the state one of the worst virus hot spots in the nation. I am reposting a series of messages from Twitter that Jones sent as police raided her home and pointed guns at her children. Jones compared Governor DeSantis and his police action to the Nazi Gestapo, which he found offensive. Oh, gee, sorry if the truth hurts, asshole.
I try to follow the bad with the good, such as the story of Dr. Katalin Kariko, who is one of many scientists responsible for mRNA vaccines.
FOX NEWS (which is an oxymoron because it’s neither foxy nor news) strangely features stories about baseless accusations against Hunter Biden and some conspiracy theory about Chinese influence and possible espionage with a Californian Senator (Democrat of course) instead of the record numbers of Americans dying due to COVID-19.
This is the world we live in now.
And there many great stories. Reno, Nevada converted a parking garage to a ward for Covid-19 patients.
A doctor loses his license after admitting he’s never worn a mask since the pandemic began!
So many good stories. Maybe the Elite Strike Force legal team fighting for Trump will fade to black now that the Electoral College is official.
Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett. Read on.
Trump should challenge Biden to a rally-off? Winner takes president???? That’s incredibly stupid.
I cannot even summarize all the level of crazy in the following.
The next WEEKLY HODGE PODGE will be Saturday, just three days from now, because of delays due to the smothering grading work.
I have said enough. Read on if you wish. Thanks for stopping in.
Ignorance is Strength.
Freedom is Slavery.
Cher saved the world’s loneliest elephant. Can she free Thailand’s last gorilla?
Remember the veep is PRESIDENT of the senate. "Majority leader" is not a position that exists by constitutional law.
Posted by Christopher Tower on Monday, November 30, 2020
THE PANDEMIC
The United States passed two milestones on Wednesday: we recorded more than 3,000 deaths and our mortality rate rose firmly above the peak of our first wave. Those vaccines can’t come fast enough.
Here’s the coronavirus death toll through December 9. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
Did COVID Data Whistleblower Hack Florida's Emergency Alert System? Police Raid Home (miamiherald.com)
Slashdot reader mtrachtenberg shares a thread on Twitter of Jones describing what happened.
1/
— Rebekah Jones (@GeoRebekah) December 7, 2020
There will be no update today.
At 8:30 am this morning, state police came into my house and took all my hardware and tech.
They were serving a warrant on my computer after DOH filed a complaint.
They pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids.. pic.twitter.com/DE2QfOmtPU
2/
— Rebekah Jones (@GeoRebekah) December 7, 2020
They took my phone and the computer I use every day to post the case numbers in Florida, and school cases for the entire country.
They took evidence of corruption at the state level.
They claimed it was about a security breach.
This was DeSantis.
He sent the gestapo.
This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly.
— Rebekah Jones (@GeoRebekah) December 7, 2020
This is what happens to people who speak truth to power.
I tell them my husband and my two children are upstairs... and THEN one of them draws his gun.
On my children.
This is Desantis' Florida.
If Desantis thought pointing a gun in my face was a good way to get me to shut up, he's about to learn just how wrong he was.
— Rebekah Jones (@GeoRebekah) December 7, 2020
I'll have a new computer tomorrow.
And then I'm going to get back to work.
If you want to help, my website is still at https://t.co/JbQtrVbRuv
I'll be joining @ChrisCuomo on @CuomoPrimeTime at about 9: 40 PM ET tonight to talk about what happened, why it won't shut me up, and what really matters: this pandemic.
— Rebekah Jones (@GeoRebekah) December 8, 2020
A lot of people asked me how they can help.
— Rebekah Jones (@GeoRebekah) December 8, 2020
1. A job not in Florida
2. Spread the word
3. https://t.co/jw4FHGqZxt
Florida Governor Defends Police Raid On COVID Data Whistleblower (yahoo.com)
Officers executed a search warrant on Jones's home on Monday morning, after knocking on her door for several minutes before she opened it and came outside with her hands up. Jones has said she wanted to settle her children before acknowledging the officers. It is not clear why the officers drew their weapons to go inside. They left with laptops and cellphones, which were being sought as part of an investigation into a Nov. 10 message sent to Florida Department of Health employees, encouraging them to resist DeSantis. State authorities allege that digital fingerprints indicate that Jones, who now runs a coronavirus dashboard of her own, was behind the message. Jones denies she was the author and maintains she did not have the means to access the department's emergency notification system, through which the note was sent. Users on Reddit have discovered that the emergency system would have been easy to access, and that anyone else -- not just Jones -- could have accessed the system and sent the Nov. 10 message with relative ease.
Sweden has at last ended its ridiculous laissez faire attitude to the virus — including actively discouraging mask use so as to bring on "herd immunity" because shruggy emoticon — and only has all these deaths plus a broken economy to show for it. — Wall Street Journal
Over 3,000 Americans died yesterday from coronavirus.
— Lis Power (@LisPower1) December 10, 2020
Fox News hasn't mentioned it once
Fox's lead stories: The investigation into Hunter Biden's taxes and Eric Swalwell knowing an alleged Chinese spy 5 years ago
In 6 1/2 hours of programming so far today Fox News has mentioned:
— Lis Power (@LisPower1) December 10, 2020
"Hunter" 95 times
"Swalwell" 56 times
the fact that over 3,000 Americans died yesterday from coronavirus **2 times**
Welcome to Reno's 911 parking garage hospital. (CNN)
How South Korea contact traced a kid who got coronavirus from 20 feet away from an infected woman for five minutes. (LA Times)
One (1) South Dakota city is not A Idiot. — BBC
Trump appointee's email demanding the CDC stop slandering the president or some shit, by putting out charts. It's a bad email! (Politico)
CDC's New Numbers Show Black Americans and
Other People of Color Dying at Higher Rates From COVID-19 Than It Previously
Reported
After initially saying that Black Americans are dying at about two times the rate of their white counterparts from COVID-19, the CDC has updated its publicly reported figures to show that the racial disparity in deaths from the disease is even wider.
An adjusted data report published by the agency this week now shows that Black people are actually dying from the coronavirus at almost 3 times the rate of their white counterparts. The change came after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D—Mass.) requested that the agency account for the disproportionate age breakdown in COVID-19 deaths experienced by people of color in the overall mortality rate for different racial demographics, reports CNBC.
In a letter to the CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield sent last month, Warren said the agency’s publicly shared data on the death rate in communities of color did not “tell the full story” because the rates did not adjust for age, which is a standard approach to measuring disease impact.
From CNBC:
The agency previously said Hispanic and Black Americans were dying at a rate of about one and two times higher than Caucasians, respectively.
The updated analysis also shows that American Indians or Alaska Natives have died at a rate 2.6 times that of White Americans. The CDC previously put that figure at 1.4 times as high as White Americans.
The CDC’s previous infographic, which downplayed the disproportionate burden on communities of color, was widely shared, including in the agency’s “Framework for Equitable Allocation of COVID-19 Vaccine.” The CDC appears to have updated the analysis on Nov. 30.
Warren says the new estimates are alarming and should serve as a wake-up call to the federal government to address the racial disparities and the systemic racism that underlies them.
The CDC has made no public announcement of the changes outside of sharing a new death rate infographic on its website.
The incoming Biden administration will be tasked with responding to the racially disproportionate way this pandemic is playing out across the country by targeting the myriad of factors—structural inequities in access to healthcare, food, and fair employment among them—causing non-white Americans to be sickened and killed more often by COVID-19.
Meanwhile, on Friday the U.S. reached a record high of 227,885 coronavirus cases and a staggering 2,010 average daily deaths from the virus, reports CNN.
Though health care workers and other high risk groups are expected to begin receiving a COVID-19 vaccine in the coming weeks, it will likely be months before most of the population will be able to do the same—and even longer for anything resembling herd immunity to be a reality, given latent fears and proliferating conspiracy theories about the safety of the newly developed vaccines.
Donald Trump's Elite Strike Force legal team cuts a wide path of destruction — and we're not just talking about in court!
The Arizona legislature is currently shut down multiple Michigan politicians are in quarantine after the president's illustrious lawyer Rudy "Normal Scrutiny" Giuliani exposed them all to Covid-19 last week. Who could have predicted that the worst thing to come out of those stupid hearings alleging vote fraud wouldn't be video of Mellisa Carone chewing the furniture?
And now Axios is reporting that yet another member of the legal dream team has tested positive for coronavirus.
Can Covid be transmitted via farts? Asking for Trump lawyer idiot Jenna Ellis, last seen carousing bareback maskless at the White House Christmas party on Friday as the guest of resident economics kook Peter Navarro.
"People brought their families," whined one senior White House official to Axios upon learning of potential exposure thanks to the president's very legal and very cool counsel. Which rather begs the question, of course. Because who in their right mind would bring their family to the Covid hotspot on Pennsylvania Avenue, site of multiple outbreaks, to party hearty with a bunch of lunatics who still think hydroxychloroquine is a magic cure?
Apparently, Ellis was already persona non grata with the White House staff for getting the old man stirred up about these fantastical lawsuits to overturn the election, which serve only to make the rest of them look like sore losers or liars or idiots — most likely all of the above.
"She had the nerve to show up at the senior staff Christmas party knowing everyone was furious with her for constantly stirring Trump up with nonsense," fumed another senior administration official to Axios. Not that "everyone" or indeed anyone would put on their big girl panties and either tell the president the truth or walk out of the White House or, hell, even spend Friday night at home in silent protest during a viral pandemic that's killing 2,500+ Americans every single day.
Reached for comment by Axios's Jonathan Swan, Ellis first chastised him for texting her after midnight — "Rude" — and then claimed to be unaware that all the cool kids on the varsity team think she's a tacky hack.
"You must be more informed than me because I haven't heard that," she sniffed, before cutting off the communication.
Meanwhile, WNYC's Andrea Bernstein reached Guiliani, who is hospitalized and claims to be receiving the same treatment as the president, i.e. the Regeneron cocktail of antibodies synthesized from the blood of recovered Covid patients for which the FDA just issued an emergency authorization.
"You can overdo the mask," he told Bernstein, adding that "this is a curable disease." He was apparently unaware that Regeneron is planning to produce just 200,000 doses by year end, and only friends of POTUS can get an infusion of other people's antibodies on demand.
UH HUH.
Well, in lieu of banhammering ourselves, Your Wonkette will simply wish the both of them a speedy and complete recovery. THE END.
[Axios]
Now that there’s a coronavirus vaccine, how do you persuade people to take it?
See Trump's Coronavirus Idiot Demanding CDC Coronavirus Reports Stop Reporting On Coronavirus
Back in September of this year — a time that now feels as remote as the James K. Polk administration, or at least that 1996 They Might Be Giants song — we learned that a Trump political appointee at Health and Human Services was trying to force Anthony Fauci to spout Donald Trump's favored bullshit about the coronavirus.
The appointee, one Paul Alexander, also sought to boss the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to present more Trump-friendly information in its weekly research reports. Alexander clearly had what was needed to override the nation's health experts, because he was previously a part-time assistant professor of health research methods at a Canadian university. Alexander was booted from HHS on Sept. 16, the same day as the guy who hired him, HHS spox Michael Caputo. But his legacy lives on as an example of the Trump administration's horrible mismanagement of the pandemic.
So why are we talking about yet another fired Trump appointee now? As Politico reports, on Monday, in a closed-door interview with the House subcommittee that's investigating the government's response to the pandemic, a senior CDC official told investigators that CDC Director Robert Redfield had instructed CDC staff to delete an Aug. 8 email in which Alexander demanded that Caputo and Redfield tell the CDC to stop publishing its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR) until Alexander could review each and every draft to make sure it complied with whatever lies Trump was spouting any given week.
That's some seriously Orwellian stuff being applied to a CDC publication considered the gold standard of public health. Except unlike the actual gold standard, it's good. And Redfield's subsequent attempt to send Alexander's stupid email down the Memory Hole probably violated federal record-keeping laws.
"I was instructed to delete the email," MMWR editor Charlotte Kent told investigators. Kent, who was on vacation when Alexander sent the email, said that she was informed of the request by a colleague who filled in for her, and that she understood the request to be from Redfield. Kent said that she never saw the email herself. "I went to look for it after I had been told to delete it, and it was already gone," she told investigators on Monday.
Rep. Jim Clyburn, who chairs the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, on Thursday raised concern the episode may be among "deliberate efforts by the Trump Administration to conceal and destroy evidence" of political meddling in the pandemic response.
We love Jim Clyburn dearly, but also No Shit, Mr. Chairman. Clyburn sent a letter to Redfield and to HHS Secretary Alex Azar reminding them that telling staff to destroy documents is unethical and possibly illegal, and could even result in prison time. To be fair, it's entirely possible both have been serving in top government posts without anyone mentioning that.
That said, Alexander's email to Caputo really WAS embarrassing, because not only did it document an attempt to undermine science and replace it with political spin, it was insanely badly written, too. He griped that
CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration and meant at this time to impact school re-openings and they then send it to the media knowing it is deceiving. I ask it be stopped now! [...]
The reports must be read by someone outside of CDC like myself, and we cannot allow the reporting to go on as it has been, for it is outrageous. Its lunacy. They may say 'it's the data'; I agree on one level, but they are constantly reporting incompletely and writing in a manner to make the nation run and dig a hole and climb inside with their children for 10 years.
Alexander also hinted at dark forces in the CDC deploying medical data to undermine the best president America has ever had, those swine, they are driving him to write crazy things and pull his hair out!!!!
The result is the administration and public is not being served. All the nation seeks is unbiased reporting of the facts, not a spin and report meant to tell a specific narrative for CDC's goals. I am not sure of what it is but it stinks. I cannot read a report and get pull hair out of my head. [...]
Nothing to go out unless I read and agree with the findings how they CDC, wrote it and I tweak it to ensure it is fair and balanced and 'complete'. And not misleading.
Just to make sure Caputo got the point, Alexander put part of the letter in red. Boy, was he angry!
How true this is! CDC is trying to hurt the Presidnet, and Alexander is only intersted in making sure Donald Trump (and future Presidnets, if any) aren't defamed by science, because after all, "They CDC, work for him," and that's how science works.
One part of Alexander's cleanup that particularly stuck in our craw was the health "researcher's" insistence that there was something dishonest in the CDC's pointing out that children, despite having fewer infections, are still at risk for severe COVID-19. Well sure, one in three hospitalized children had to be admitted to the ICU, but can't CDC simply emphasize the positive part where most kids don't end up in the ICU and leave it at that?
That data is right there in the blue highlighted part, you jerk who may not be pretending and might not actually know what words mean, going by that email.
Politico notes that Redfield issued a statement Thursday in which he "didn't deny telling staff to delete the email, though he said he instructed them to 'ignore Dr. Alexander's comments.'" He also said he's "fully committed to maintaining the independence of the MMWR," so honestly, why all the fuss if he tried to do a little cleaning up?
Also too, a spokesperson from HHS griped that the House committee hadn't included the full context of Ms. Kent's interview with the committee, because "during her testimony Dr. Kent repeatedly said there was no political interference in the MMWR process." See, all she did was present evidence of political interference, while denying it was interference, is all. Shame on you monsters. Politico points out that the HHS spox also ignored questions about whether Redfield had directed HHS staff to delete the email, because as any fool can see from all of this, the real crime is not making Donald Trump's coronavirus response look good, the end.
[Politico / Paul Alexander email]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely through reader donations! If you can manage a monthly $5 to $10 donation, we promise not to slander you with science unless we absolutely have to.
Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons.
(Dalton Bennett and Sarah Cahlan/The Washington Post)
See exactly how airborne coronavirus spreads, using infrared footage
To visually illustrate the risk of airborne transmission in real time, The Post used an infrared camera capable of detecting exhaled breath.
THE WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT
If you prefer your data in a visual format, here's the current map from COVID Exit Strategy, using data from the CDC and the COVID Tracking Project.
I want to add this link to the weekly report. It's important to remember:
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1983 - Is Coronavirus more contagious and more deadly than the flu? YES.
ALSO... I am seeing a big discrepancy between the Johns Hopkins data in death totals and WORLDOMETER data, which aggregates data from many more sources. Could this be the slow down due to the change in how the CDC obtains the data, having it filter first through Health and Human Services department.
United States
Coronavirus Cases:
Deaths:
Recovered:
 |
 |
Dr. Anthony Fauci Appeals to Black Community: ‘The Vaccine That You’re Going to Be Taking Was Developed by an African American Woman’
https://www.theroot.com/dr-anthony-fauci-appeals-to-black-community-the-vacc-1845853569
With skepticism about the safety and efficacy of a COVID-19 vaccine running high among African Americans, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, wants Black people to know that a Black woman, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, was heavily involved in developing one of the vaccines that will soon be available to Americans later this month.
Fauci, speaking at a National Urban League event on Tuesday, acknowledged the history behind African American distrust of medical research and the American health care system, reports CNN. But the epidemiologist also emphasized that the two forthcoming coronavirus vaccines are both safe and effective, drawing attention to Dr. Corbett’s involvement in the process.
“The very vaccine that’s one of the two that has absolutely exquisite levels—94 to 95 percent efficacy against clinical disease and almost 100 percent efficacy against serious disease that are shown to be clearly safe—that vaccine was actually developed in my institute’s vaccine research center by a team of scientists led by Dr. Barney Graham and his close colleague, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, or Kizzy Corbett,” Fauci said.
“So, the first thing you might want to say to my African American brothers and sisters is that the vaccine that you’re going to be taking was developed by an African American woman,” he continued. “And that is just a fact.”
The vaccine Fauci is referring to is the one that will be released by Moderna, one of two vaccines that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to give emergency use authorization to (the other will be distributed by Pfizer). Dr. Corbett, the lead scientist for the National Institute of Health’s coronavirus vaccine research, has spoken out about institutional distrust in the Black community in the past, saying she’s seen the hesitancy to take vaccines first-hand.
“I would say to people who are vaccine-hesitant that you’ve earned the right to ask the questions that you have around these vaccines and this vaccine development process,” Corbett told the CNN podcast “Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction.”
This hesitancy is well-documented and rooted in a painful history. One recent study found just 14 percent of Black people trust that a vaccine will be safe, and only 18 percent believed it would effectively protect them from COVID-19.
Distrust in a vaccine was also linked to a broader distrust in the government at large, as well as knowledge of the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which African American men were unknowingly studied for the venereal disease—and not given treatment for it. Two out of every three Black respondents in the same study said the government could never or could only rarely be trusted to look after their interests.
This is concerning for public health experts, who note that the success of these vaccines is contingent on having enough Americans take them.
Black Americans, in particular, have been especially vulnerable to developing the most severe symptoms of COVID-19, for reasons that are largely systemic. For the last several months, Black physicians have been reaching out to their communities to educate and encourage people to take a vaccine once it becomes available.
“Trust, especially when it has been stripped from people, has to be rebuilt in a brick-by-brick fashion,” Dr. Corbett said. “And so, what I say to people firstly is that I empathize, and then secondly is that I’m going to do my part in laying those bricks. And I think that if everyone on our side, as physicians and scientists, went about it that way, then the trust would start to be rebuilt.”
Here’s Why the GOP Doesn’t Care About Pumping More Relief Money Into the Pandemic Economy
KEVIN DRUM
I’m having a little trouble finding something both new and interesting to write about today, but luckily for us all the Fed released its latest Flow of Funds report this morning. I may have some additional interesting tidbits to write about later, but for now here’s the basic distribution of national income:
Apologies for the chart being so busy, but the results are pretty clear. As you can see, corporate profits have recovered completely from their pandemic low and proprieters’ income has not only recovered but skyrocketed. Both are at or above their trendline growth from before the pandemic.
And then there’s employee compensation. That’s you and me and all the wait staff and retail employees and so forth who are still furloughed while we wait for the economy to open back up. Employee compensation has not recovered. It’s about $40 billion below its pre-pandemic trendline growth. But hey, what’s $40 billion between friends?
Answer: Quite a bit, actually! This is mostly income lost by those who have been furloughed, which amounts to something like 10 million workers. That comes to an average of about $4,000 each, which is why a one-off $600 stimulus payment is laughable to these folks. Conversely, an extra $300 a week for three months would make them nearly whole.
But as long as corporate profits are doing OK, Republicans just can’t be bothered with this kind of petty detail. I guess that’s why they’re the party of the regular guy, or so I keep hearing from them.
THE ELECTION & POLITICS
INSANITY
Infowars' DeAnna Lorraine Wants Trump To Challenge Biden To A 'Rally-Off'
Infowars correspondent/QAnon lady DeAnna Lorraine very firmly believes that Trump actually did win the election and that part of the reason we know this was because of how big his rallies were. In a rant this week, she suggested that he just keep holding rallies as if he won the election and that — to settle this election once and for all (the election is very much settled) he challenge Joe Biden to a rally-off. That way, she explains, he can prove that all of Biden's voters were ghost voters.
QAnon conspiracy theorist/Infowars host DeAnna Lorraine urges Trump to start holding rallies and challenge Biden "to a rally-off." pic.twitter.com/XJwDMKAWwO
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) December 4, 2020
State Attorneys General Agree: Texas AG Ken Paxton Can Go Eat A F*ck
.@MIAttyGen @dananessel issued the following statement in response to the lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking to overturn election results in Michigan and other states: pic.twitter.com/62Y4SLpiis
— Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (@MIAttyGen) December 8, 2020
This has become a circus.
— Josh Shapiro (@JoshShapiroPA) December 8, 2020
The continued attacks on our election are beyond meritless, beyond reckless. It is a scheme by 🤡 the sitting president & his enablers 🤡 to disregard the will of the people. It’s not serious & it will not stand.https://t.co/SWhZmnB5C4
Trump Struggles With Defeat in His First Postelection Rally
The President walked onto the stage with First Lady Melania Trump shortly after 7:00 pm to the song “God Bless the U.S.A.” by country singer Lee Greenwood. After the First Lady delivered a short introduction stressing the importance of maintaining Republican control of the Senate, President Trump took the podium and almost immediately, and falsely, declared, “We won Georgia.” (A recount found that President-elect Biden won the state with a margin of more than 12,000 votes.) Over the next two hours, Trump raged about how the election had been “rigged” and regurgitated misinformation about the voting system, such as the disproven assertion that there were more ballots submitted than there were registered voters in several battleground states. “If I lost, I’d be a very gracious loser. If I lost, I’d say I lost, and I’d go to Florida and I’d take it easy and I’d go around and say I did a good job,” Trump said around halfway through the rally. “But you can’t ever accept when they steal and rig and rob.” In one of a number of instances in which he seemed close to acknowledging that he would not be president after Jan. 20, Trump further promised to “win back the White House” in 2024.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/12/the-supreme-court-just-ditched-a-lawsuit-that-sought-to-overturn-bidens-decisive-win/
The Supreme Court Just Ditched a Lawsuit That Sought to Overturn Biden’s Decisive Win in Pennsylvania
In a lawsuit filed last month, Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Penn.) and other GOP politicians argued that Pennsylvania’s vote-by-mail system violates the state’s constitution and that millions of largely Democratic mail-in-ballots cast in during the election were, therefore, invalid. In a brief, lawyers for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) and Democratic lawmakers derided Kelly’s lawsuit, calling its claims “fundamentally frivolous.”
After Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court threw out Kelly’s lawsuit, the congressman appealed to the Supreme Court, which threw out the case.
This is so appalling. It doesn’t even matter what the reason is. Maybe it’s mass delusion. Maybe it’s cowardice. Maybe it’s just the usual cynical con designed to keep the conservative base outraged. Whatever the reason, the result is ever more senseless destruction of a political system that, for all its faults, is still fundamentally sound if all sides act even remotely reasonably. But for how much longer?
UPDATE: Now we’re up to 27!
Trump Once Again Bullies Georgia Governor to Overturn Election Results—This Time by Phone
https://www.motherjones.com/2020-elections/2020/12/trump-kemp-georgia-phone-call-washington-post/
Kemp declined Trump’s schemes, according to the Post, which included trying to persuade the governor to somehow force the state legislature to throw out the results and pick pro-Trump electors to subvert Georgia’s will in the Electoral College count. According to the Post:
Trump pressed Kemp to call a special session of the state legislature to get lawmakers to override the results and appoint electors that would back him, according to a person familiar with the conversation. He also asked the governor to demand an audit of signatures on mail ballots, something Kemp has previously noted he has no power to do… Kemp has also said that he will not call for a special session of the legislature.
Trump phoned Kemp directly just hours before he’s set to appear at a Georgia rally to campaign for Republicans competing in high profile run-off elections next month, contests that could decide the balance of power in the Senate.
Michele Bachmann Pretty Mad Satan Stole Her Vote
On Nov. 13, 2020, Wonkette published a very important journalism expose about the Sandwich Vans what stole the election for Joe Biden away from Donald Trump, who deserves to be dictator for life. It was a guest on the Lou Dobbs program who explained it, this is she:
Our journalism feature was in all caps because the woman on Lou Dobbs was in all caps, and her story was in all caps. We didn't look up her name, which is why we didn't win a Pulitzer for that piece. Honestly, we figured it was just Trump moron lawyer Jenna Ellis making a funny face and doing an SNL-style bit. But she explained to Dobbs that she worked a 24-hour shift at the vote-rigging center in Detroit and they were supposed to feed them but they didn't feed them and these vans that pulled up well she thought there was sandwich in them but there wasn't sandwich in them and besides you can't fit that much sandwich into one van, not for everybody who needed sandwich and did we mention she was hungry and wanted sandwich OK so in summary and in conclusion BALLOT FRAUD.
Meet Mellissa Carone with two 'L's, one of the Trump legal team's star witnesses for both day one and day two of their hearings before the Michigan legislature, where they are arguing that the entire election in Michigan was invalid because Black people voted and Trump did not win.
You have perhaps already seen the now-viral video of Carone testifying on Wednesday, probably because she was so good at testifying that you shared it with everybody you ever met. If you haven't seen it, though, watch it here, if only for the part where Rudy Giuliani tries to pull Carone back from the edge of the cliff:
You know you're living life right when Rudy Giuliani — Rudy Giuliani — nudges you while you're talking like, "OK lady, no offense, but you sound LI'L BIT BATSHIT."
Choice quote:
"That poll book? Is completely off! Completely off! I'd say that poll book is off by over 100,000. That poll book? Why don't you look at the registered voters on there? How many registered voters are on there? Do you know the answer to that? Zero. Zero. There's zero."
ZERO! ZERO registered voters, in the WHOLE OF WAYNE COUNTY!
When Republican state Rep. Steven Johnson — yes, Republican — tried to tell Carone that he simply didn't see the discrepancies in the poll books Carone appeared to be hallucinating, she slurred, "WHADDDDDDDDDJU GUYS DO? TAKE IT AND DO SUMPIN' CRAZY TO IT?" She added, "I signed something saying if I'm wrong, I can go to prison, DIDJU?"
WELL DIDJU?
Carone didn't want to be under oath. As the Daily Beast reports, after exclaiming, "I have an affidavit!" she added, "I am a mother, I have two children, I have two degrees. I don't know any woman in the world that would write an affidavit under oath just to write it." (You remember all those Trump campaign Michigan affidavits, yeah? The ones Kayleigh McEnany has been waving around on TV? The ones that were like "I saw a Black man and he was big and he looked at me"? The ones a judge has already said are absolutely full of shit?)
Carone claims she was a "contractor" for DOMINION!11!!1VOTINGMACHINEsS!!!HUGOCHAVEZ!11! though she had a pretty hard time explaining what exactly her "job" was, so who knows if that is even true? Who knows if her name is even Mellissa Carone? Maybe she is just Jenny McCarthy, in which case we are all glad she's found gainful employment. (You know, assuming she is somehow being paid out of the Trump grifter slush fund, not that we're saying she definitely is.)
HuffPost reporter Ryan Reilly shared some screengrabs of this star witness, whom Rudy Giuliani claims he just met. (No, we do not know if Rudy has tried to ask her back to his hotel room for any "shirt-tucking" yet, please stop asking.)
That last screengrab appears to reveal that Mellissa Carone is simply some loud camera-hogging idiot the Trump campaign found at a Stop The Steal rally. This is the best they got, kids.
In Carone's Tuesday testimony, she explained that she didn't like the parking arrangements for poll workers, therefore fraud:
She also made up some shit Tuesday about poll workers running batches of ballots over and over again. "Everything that happened at that TCF Center was fraud," Carone explained about the vote tabulation center in Detroit that Sidney Powell tried to use as evidence for her Wisconsin lawsuit. As Wonkette noted yesterday in our post about the first day of sideshow hearings in the Michigan lege, a judge has already looked at Carone's claims and credibility and found them to be ... what's the legal term? Oh yes, we believe the Latin term is LOLFUCKOFF.
In summary and in conclusion, Donald Trump is probably right now this second hiring this woman as a full-timer on his legal team, or maybe considering her as a replacement for Bill Barr, whom he now wants to fire for being Deep State. Wouldn't Attorney General Mellissa with Two L's be pretty great?
We'll leave you with this supercut Parker Molloy from Media Matters made, of Carone and the SNL "Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started A Conversation With At A Party" character. As you can see, it really is uncanny.
[videos via Ryan Reilly on Twitter]
Today Is a Bad Day for People Who Want to Overturn Election Results
What’s important about this day?
Safe harbor is optional in the sense that states don’t have to comply with it, it’s advantageous to do so. But sometimes I use the analogy to college admissions. Most colleges have a deadline. If you don’t apply for college by this date, we’re not going to consider your application. Whereas, early decision or early action is an option. If you want to put yourself in that category, then you have to meet the earlier deadline. But if you don’t, you still can apply.
How will safe harbor affect Trump’s legal challenges?
I think Wisconsin, unfortunately, is going to not comply with a proper deadline, because they’ve got a hearing scheduled for Thursday, pursuant to state law, and that’s going to take them out of the safe harbor. Wisconsin has already certified, but they authorize a statutory challenge to the certification. That and the statute, if you’re going to be safe-harbor-compliant, mean you have to achieve a final determination of any contest procedure. Wisconsin has that procedure, but it’s not going to achieve final determination until after December 8.
Do we need to worry about other states not getting safe harbor because of these lawsuits?
The mere filing of a lawsuit can’t deprive a state of safe harbor status, if the lawsuit is not timely. In Pennsylvania law, if you want to contest the certification of the appointment of electors, you can do that, but there’s a deadline. My understanding is, if somebody files a purported contest after the deadline, that does not deprive Pennsylvania of safe harbor.
Likewise, if Rudy Giuliani makes up some new procedure that only he and Jenna Ellis know about that doesn’t exist in Pennsylvania law, the fact that they file a new lawsuit claiming they want the courts to do something doesn’t deprive Pennsylvania of Safe Harbor.
The problem with Wisconsin is there is the statutory procedure. Wisconsin Supreme Court invoked it when it said “Don’t sue us in original action—go to the right court.” And then that court says, “Oh, we’re going to hold a hearing on Thursday.” That’s what will deprive Wisconsin of safe harbor. It’s an authorized procedure and it’s not going to be finished by tomorrow.
Let’s say I’m a very paranoid person who wants Joe Biden to become president. Is there anything left for me to be paranoid about?
No, I mean, none of this is going to matter in terms of inauguration. Joe Biden is going to take the oath on January 20. He’s going to get the nuclear codes and become president and commander-in-chief.
There’s lots of reasons to be concerned about what Trump is doing and how the Republican Party is reacting, and Congress. What I am a little bit concerned about is whether any senator joins Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL). Brooks announced he’s going to object to Biden’s electoral votes on January 6. If members of Congress are acting properly on January 6, they should care about whether a state has safe harbor status or not. And if a state does have it, they should not even begin to think about evidence or anything. Let’s say Georgia gets safe harbor status, then the whole question about Dominion voting or did Georgia do the right thing or not the right thing, a conscientious member of Congress should say, “I don’t get to look at that. What safe harbor means is Georgia got to make that decision, right or wrong, and I’m bound by whatever Georgia did. So, President Trump, don’t be mad at me; I don’t get to make this judgment.”
That’s why safe harbor uses the word conclusive. It means that Georgia’s decision is conclusive on Congress. If a state like Wisconsin loses safe harbor status, as I think Wisconsin will, given the scheduled hearing, then I don’t think a senator can say Wisconsin’s already made the decision. I can’t look at it. The senator has to say, all right, what’s the merits of Wisconsin now? Again, the merits should be that Biden won. But how many members of Congress are going to agree with Brooks’ objection? I’d like to think that number is as small as possible. I mean, any senator or representative who agrees with Brooks is, in effect, claiming that Biden didn’t win that state. And since that doesn’t comport with reality, that’s problematic.
One could see all of this as an expression that our institutions are vulnerable, but maybe another way to look at it is a stress test—which we are passing.
Both things are true. My view is that the glass half empty is the better view at the moment than the glass half full. Yes, we survived the stress test, but we were stressed more than we should have been. The anti-reality forces have made this more of an issue than is warranted on the facts. So even though they are not going to prevail, the fact that they’ve shaped the discussion as much as they have is not a sign of health. It’s a sign more of weakness and vulnerability.
The current facts I would have considered beyond the range of contestation. The fact that they are within the range means that, if it had been even closer, the ability to make a real contest out of it would have been more likely. So if it had been one state with a 1,000-vote margin, we’d be in a lot different shape than we are with six states significantly beyond that. The fundamental point is that these forces were not willing to accept whatever the objective facts were. And that’s worrisome, right? If they’re not willing to accept the objective facts this time, what about next time?
How Dozens of Trump’s Political Appointees Will Stay in Government After Biden Takes Over
Documents show that officials appointed by Trump who’d otherwise lose their jobs under Biden have been approved for permanent positions in federal agencies.
The Trump administration could speed up the replacement of civil servants before inauguration because of an executive order the president issued in October. It creates a new “Schedule F” category for career employees who have policy-making or policy-advocating roles, and it weakens their employment protections to the point where they could be booted for their political views.
Ron Sanders, a longtime federal government human resources executive who recently resigned from an OPM advisory body called the Federal Salary Council in protest of Schedule F, said the Trump administration still has plenty of time to act on that order in its final weeks.
“I have been contacted by dozens of regular civil servants slated to be converted into Schedule F,” Sanders said, “which means they could be removed with little or no procedural protection or due process. And they could be replaced by somebody else.”
I truly don’t get this. I literally can’t think of any coherent reason to prefer a flat $600 benefit for everyone—most of whom don’t need it—instead of a targeted benefit for those who do need it. The flat payment would be worse stimulus; it wouldn’t be as helpful to those in need; and it wouldn’t cost any less. But Donald Trump is so blinkered that he can’t imagine anything being better than just sending everyone a check with his name on it. Or something.
Can anyone explain this to me? It seems like such a no-brainer. Has someone in the GOP brain trust decided that unemployment benefits go more toward Democratic-leaning workers than Republican-leaning workers? Are they still stuck on the idea that unemployment payments will prompt workers to stay at home lazing on the couch instead of getting back to workplaces that aren’t even open? Are they afraid that UI benefits go mostly to the poor, and they hate the idea of helping the poor? Is it something else? This is just inexplicable.
Judge says Trump can't just ban an entire publishing platform because "emergency" after all, in re TikTok. Who would have guessed? (NPR)
Trump voters don't really believe Biden stole the election — but they do want a coup
Conservatives aren't entirely delusional — they're trolls arguing in bad faith to delegitimize Democratic voters
Polls show that a hefty majority of Republican voters — 68%, according to Reuters/Ipsos — say they believe the 2020 election was "rigged" in Biden's favor. Since the election, more than $200 million has flowed into Trump's coffers from Republican donors responding to emails promising to "stop the steal." Are these donors innocent lambs who sincerely believe that Trump is a good man done wrong? Or are they people who are actively seeking to finance a coup, employing the flimsiest of excuses?
Well, as the author of a book called "Troll Nation," it's clear where I stand: By and large, Republican voters who claim that Biden stole the election are arguing from bad faith, not delusion.
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The appeal of this conspiracy theory to racists isn't subtle. It's a way to deny the legitimacy of Black voters without coming right out and saying it. This isn't just a conspiracy theory about Trump's fragile ego. It speaks directly to long-standing right-wing fury at minority voting rights. Historian Jeffrey Herf notes another historical precedent at play, comparing Trump's conspiracy theory to the ones that rose up in Germany between the first and second world wars in a recent Washington Post op-ed:
[Trump's] efforts to deny the reality of defeat and threaten democracy recall the most famous comparable episode in modern European history — the claims by the German military and diplomatic establishment that Germany had not been defeated militarily in World War I. Instead, they argued, Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by liberals, socialists, communists and Jews who somehow snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
In reality, Herf points out, the war was "lost because of the superiority of the Allied military" and German hubris leading to bad battlefield decisions. But claiming to believe otherwise gave conservative Germans a chance to save face and, perhaps more important, an excuse to bash other Germans — mostly leftists and Jews — who they didn't want to acknowledge as equal citizens. Was it bad faith or misapprehension? As I note in a recent newsletter, Jean-Paul Sartre felt strongly it was the former at the time, and argued the "bad faith" case in his famous 1946 essay on anti-Semitism .
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/09/944385798/poll-just-a-quarter-of-republicans-accept-election-outcome
Poll: Just A Quarter Of Republicans Accept Election Outcome
A solid majority of Americans trust that the results of the 2020 presidential election are accurate, but only about a quarter of Republicans do, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey.
Sixty-one percent say they trust the results, including two-thirds of independents, but just 24% of Republican respondents say they accept the results.
Nonetheless, President-elect Joe Biden is set to take office Jan. 20, and the coronavirus pandemic will be a central focus. On that front, Americans largely have confidence in Biden's ability to handle the crisis, and the number saying they'll take a vaccine when it comes available has risen over the past few months. But skepticism about a vaccine is driven by Republicans, particularly Republican women.
As Biden prepares to take over, media normalizes Republican obstruction
Conventional media is preemptively kneecapping Biden, presenting GOP intransigence as ho-hum normal politics
Lisa Mascaro's recent story for the Associated Press correctly acknowledged "the political reality of a narrowly controlled Senate that will leave the new Democratic administration dependent on rival Republicans to get anything done."
But before you know it, she was describing inexcusable conduct as if it were just normal politics, writing that "Republicans are swiftly signaling that they're eager to set the terms of debate and exact a price for their votes."
She described the GOP's plight quite sympathetically, as "suspended between an outgoing president it needs to keep close — Trump can still make or break careers with a single tweet — and the new one they are unsure how to approach."
Patricia Zengerle of Reuters reported on Nov. 24 that "Republican members of the U.S. Senate fired warning shots to President-elect Joe Biden that they may be prepared to stand in the way of his Cabinet appointments, despite the long-held tradition of a new president having the right to choose who will run government agencies."
Hunter Biden announced Wednesday he had been notified that he is under federal investigation for his tax affairs, reportedly to determine whether he properly reported income derived from China-related business deals. The U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware is leading the investigation that was first launched in late 2018 and has reportedly included potential criminal violations of tax and money laundering laws. Prosecutors, however, have not found sufficient evidence in the money laundering portion of the investigation to move forward with a prosecution, the New York Times reports. The true extent of the investigation is not completely clear, but its existence will further complicate the presidential transition for President-elect Joe Biden, who has emphasized his desire to depoliticize the Department of Justice after President Donald Trump treated the DOJ as his personal investigative agency.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/12/trump-doomed-supreme-court-filing-civil-war.html
On Wednesday afternoon, 17 states endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s doomed lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to nullify millions of votes and hand Donald Trump a second term. Trump himself then intervened in a brief riddled with debunked conspiracy theories and at least one outright factual error. The odds that the Supreme Court will take this case, let alone rule for the plaintiffs, remain at right around zero. But the dispute remains noteworthy as a preview of the conservative legal movement’s direction after Trump leaves office. The president will leave the White House on Jan. 20. The conservative attorneys who have become radicalized under his influence, however, will remain in power across the country.
This case, Texas v. Pennsylvania, is so ridiculous that it is not worth exploring its legal claims in any depth. Paxton’s suit asks the Supreme Court to throw out every vote in four states won by Joe Biden—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—then direct each state’s legislature to declare Trump the winner. This act would constitute the single biggest incident of voter nullification in American history. Paxton alleges that all four states illegally expanded mail voting, permitted egregious fraud, then concealed evidence that Democrats stole the election. There is no basis in truth for his factual claims and no basis in law for his legal theories. Indeed, it seems likely that Paxton, who is reportedly under FBI investigation for corruption, is more interested in obtaining a preemptive pardon from Trump than presenting a coherent legal argument.
The Supreme Court Just Threw Out Texas’ Absurd Election Lawsuit
The widely derided suit sought to undo the results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
The Supreme Court on Friday threw out a Texas lawsuit that aimed to invalidate millions of ballots in four swing states. Had the suit been successful, it could have effectively handed the presidential victory to Donald Trump.
The case—which was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and supported by the Republican AGs of numerous states—argued that Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania “unconstitutionally” changed their voting procedures in the run-up to the November election. The suit also asked the Supreme Court to delay the December 14 meeting of Electoral College electors.
One of the groups Raffensperger is investigating is the New Georgia Project, which was founded by Stacey Abrams in 2013 to register young people and voters of color in the state and was chaired by Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock until February. The group, Raffensperger said on November 30, “sent voter registration applications to New York City” and would be “held responsible” if it encouraged “illegal voting.”
Nsé Ufot, the CEO of the New Georgia Project, told me the accusation was “ridiculous” and “not true.” She said the group had sent postcards to volunteers, including in New York City, who wanted to send letters to eligible Georgia voters encouraging them to register and turn out on January 5. “Their allegation is we are trying to register voters out of state, which we are not,” she said. “It’s flimsy as hell—their evidence is thinner than a single strand of hair.”
A few days later, Raffsenperger held another press conference, where he held up postcards that had been sent by the group to his son who passed away two years ago, encouraging him to register to vote. “We have proof in our own home,” he said.
Ufot said the mailing had been sent to Raffsenperger’s son based on faulty data in Georgia’s voter file or other databases used to find unregistered voters and was not a nefarious attempt to register dead people to vote. Nonetheless, Trump supporters seized on the investigations as evidence that the voter fraud they claimed existed was now real. Fox News called it “a formal acknowledgement that there was some impropriety in the voting process.”
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Leaders in the Republican-controlled state legislature have gone much further, vowing to take up sweeping restrictions on mail voting when they convene in a new session next year after the runoff. These measures would make mail voting available only to people with a valid reason, ban drop boxes for mail voting, and make it easier to reject mail ballots.
Though Republicans have long touted mail voting in Georgia, this year Democrats—and Black voters in particular—voted by mail at much higher rates than GOP voters after Trump attacked the process. Georgia House Speaker David Ralston predicted in the spring that mail voting “will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”
There was no evidence of fraudulent mail voting in Georgia or any other state in 2020, but the mere perception of such fraud among Trump supporters is now enough to justify new restrictions on voting. “The Georgia Senate Republicans have heard the calls of millions of Georgians who have raised deep and heartfelt concerns that state law has been violated and our elections process abused in our November 3, 2020 elections,” the state senate GOP caucus said in a statement on Tuesday. “We will fix this.” Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs argued that voter ID requirements were needed for mail ballots to prevent candidates from claiming the election was rigged.
“We have a Republican Party that is singularly focused on disinformation warfare around nonexistent voter fraud,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the voting rights group Fair Fight and Abrams’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign manager, told me. “We can look at state after state in the country where those disinformation narratives are directly connected to restrictions on the right to vote.”
There’s a long history of this tactic in Georgia. In 2014, when he was secretary of state, Kemp first opened an investigation into voter registration drives by the New Georgia Project, which Abrams was overseeing at the time. “We’re just not going to put up with fraud,” Kemp said. The group submitted 85,000 voter registration applications that year, and roughly 50—.06 percent of the total—were deemed to be forgeries submitted by independent contractors. (Under Georgia law, the New Georgia Project was required to submit all applications it received, regardless of whether they were legitimate.) Kemp’s own investigator concluded there was no evidence of wrongdoing, and no one was charged. Yet Kemp continued to raise the specter of fraud to erect new barriers to voting, such as removing voters from the rolls, blocking registration drives, and rejecting mail ballots.
LANGUAGE DEFINES REALITY
https://www.wonkette.com/georgia-republicans-vow-to-never-repeat-mistake-of-holding-fair-elections
A Pro-Trump Voting “Expert” Was Questioned About His Data. It Did Not Go Well for Him.
Matt Braynard was grilled by a Georgia legislator, and his claim of illegal voting was undercut.
Matt Braynard, a onetime Trump campaign operative, has produced analyses of the 2020 vote in swing states that claim massive amounts of illegal votes were cast. He has testified alongside Rudy Giuliani, as the the personal lawyer for Donald Trump crusades to overturn the election. Braynard’s work has been cited in a number of GOP lawsuits seeking to nullify the election in key states. He has raised nearly $700,000 for his so-called “Voter Integrity Project,” and he has been paid handsomely to serve as an expert witness on voting data in several of the court cases. But on Thursday morning, he and his research were eviscerated by a Georgia state representative during an “elections investigative hearing” mounted by Republicans in the state House of Representatives.
Trump and his comrades have insisted that the 2020 tally, in which Trump decisively lost the presidency, was fraudulent, but he and his minions have not provided any credible evidence of fraud or cheating. Perhaps the closest thing to evidence they have to offer is the data analysis that Braynard has compiled. Braynard led the data operation for Trump’s 2016 campaign (until he was fired in some sort of personnel dispute), and he remains a huge Trump fan. (A proud conservative nationalist, Braynard once created a literary magazine named after an ultra-nationalist teenager in Japan who in 1960 brutally assassinated a socialist politician.) After the 2020 election, Braynard began collecting and studying voting data—examining various databases and conducting phone surveys—and he has since argued that the results were tarnished by a large influx of illegal votes. He has been collaborating with a conservative legal organization called the Thomas More Society that has ties to Trump’s legal team.
This work has brought in a flood of dollars. Braynard says that the money donated to his project will only be used to cover its costs; he won’t take a cut. But he has been enlisted as an expert witness in at least three cases challenging the election results in which he has been paid a fee. According to court records, he earned $40,000 in a Georgia case, $40,000 in an Arizona case, and $150,000 in a Wisconsin case. (It is unclear whether any of these fees overlap.) In the Wisconsin matter, he declared, “It is my opinion that due to the lax controls on absentee voting in the November 3, 2020 election that the current unofficial results of that election include tens of thousands of individuals who were not eligible to vote or failed to record ballots from individuals that were. As a result, it is my opinion that the unofficial results should not be certified.” He essentially said the same in the other two cases.
Braynard’s work has been challenged in court. In a filing in a Georgia case—which was eventually dismissed—Democratic lawyers contended that Braynard “does not have the appropriate qualifications to opine on these topics, he does not follow standard methodology in the relevant scientific field, and the survey underlying several of his opinions is fatally flawed.” They cited a report by Stephen Ansolabehere, a Harvard professor and well-known expert in voting and statistics, which slammed Braynard’s findings. Ansolabehere maintained there was “no scientific basis” for Braynard’s claims and said that Braynard presented “no standard errors or confidence intervals, which are necessary to gauge how informative estimates are.” He insisted that Braynard was making inaccurate extrapolations of limited data and that the phone surveys Braynard used had “design flaws.” Other statisticians have harshly criticized Braynard’s methods.
On Tuesday, Braynard sent a letter to the governor, attorney general, and secretary of state of Georgia, claiming he had uncovered 21,000 illegal ballots in the Peach State. He included a USB with what he described as “evidence.” But two days later, when he testified at a Zoom hearing held by Republican Georgia state legislators—right before Giuliani would testify to the group—his conclusions and work were seriously undermined. He was even made to look foolish.
Braynard told the legislators that 1,043 early and absentee ballots cast in Georgia in the 2020 election came from people who had registered using a postal box “disguised as a residential address”—which is against the rules. He also stated that by checking a national registry of address changes and other databases he had determined that 20,312 voters were people who had moved out of Georgia or who had registered to vote in another state. And he added that at least 395 votes had been cast by people who had voted in Georgia and another state. He asserted that “the number of ballots that are strongly indicated as illegally cast [in Georgia] surpass the margin of victory in the presidential election.” (Of course, there was no telling who these supposedly illegal votes were cast for.) In defending his methodology, he cited scholarly articles written by Ansolabehere, the Harvard professor who had condemned Braynard’s work. He also noted that he had turned over his information to the FBI.
At first, the hearing went smoothly for Braynard, who has the professional presentation of a data specialist. But then came state Rep. Bee Nguyen, a Democrat from Atlanta. It turns out she had been doing her own research. Citing an exhibit filed by Braynard that listed people who had voted but who supposedly had registered in Georgia and another state, she pointed out that several names were duplicated on the list. Then she said that she had looked up the first 10 names on the list and had found eight of these people listed in Georgia property records as residents. She reached one of them on the phone, she said, and he confirmed that he lived and voted only in Georgia. Nguyen said she verified this person’s voting record.
Taking another name from this list—a woman allegedly registered in Georgia and Arizona—she confirmed this person’s residence and voting record in Georgia, and she found another voter with the exact same name listed in the Arizona voter rolls, born in the same year but with a different birth date. She also identified another person on the list in a similar situation: same name, different birth dates.
In rapid-fire fashion, Nguyen continued on. She turned to the Braynard list of voters who he said had registered with postal boxes “disguised” as residences. She recognized one of the addresses as being around the corner from her home—a condo complex with a FedEx center on the first floor. (Some apartment buildings use a postal box-like system for their addresses.) A friend in the building sent her a list of residents of the complex. They were all on Braynard’s list, she said. And the same was true, she had discovered, for another condo complex with a FedEx center. On her own, she said, she had discovered that 128 names on this list—more than 10 percent of Braynard’s total number—were errors.
And Nguyen wasn’t done. One of the names on the list of people who had allegedly voted in two states—a crime—belonged to a neighbor of another state representative, Teri Anulewicz, a Cobb County Democrat. This person had supposedly voted in Georgia and Maryland. Anulewicz contacted her neighbor, and, according to Nguyen, he told Anulewicz that he had never voted in Maryland but has a father with the exact same name. Nguyen looked at another name on this particular list—a person who had allegedly voted in Georgia and Virginia—and she found two people in those states with that name but with different birth dates. And one of her own constituents, she said, appeared on this list. Nguyen drove to her house, she recounted, and the woman told her that she and her husband had lived in Georgia their entire lives and had never been to the other state.
Nguyen concluded this dissection of Braynard with a serious charge: “Many of the names listed on your exhibit are erroneous. You have alleged that these voters have committed a felony.” She criticized Braynard for having made no effort to contact some of them and verify the information. And referring to one couple she spoke to, Nguyen added, “They have no idea they are being accused of committing a crime in a public filing.”
Braynard did not have a lot to say about the problematic examples Nguyen had cited when she was done. “Thank you for helping to raise issues to help better validate the data,” he remarked. And he told Nguyen that he would “be more than happy” to “get back to you.” Then the hearing moved on to an appearance by Giuliani, who insisted there was no question that the election in Georgia had been rigged against Trump. (He claimed there were a thousand people “on tape admitting fraud” and accused the state’s Republican governor and Republican secretary of state of perpetuating a “cover-up.”)
A week earlier, in a Wisconsin case that was partly based on Braynard’s research, the state supreme court had shot down that challenge to the election, with one conservative justice writing that the petitioners had relied “almost entirely on the unsworn expert report of a former campaign employee that offers statistical estimates based on call center samples and social media research.” That is, his work didn’t fly legally. And when cross-examined by Nguyen, who had engaged in her own basic fact-checking, Braynard’s research and his standing as an expert appeared to crumble.
After the hearing, I contacted Braynard to get his take on what had happened. He didn’t respond.
SANITY
I have literally never heard of Lloyd Austin before now, so obviously I have nothing personal against him. But there are two problems here. First, civilians should ultimately control the Pentagon. Trump broke this tradition with James Mattis and Biden should have firmly reestablished it. Second, a Democratic president should appoint Democrats to lead the Defense Department. Not Bill Cohen. Not Robert Gates. Not Chuck Hagel. And not Lloyd Austin. Democrats need to stop feeding the longtime Republican insinuation that people can’t trust the Mommy Party to run our wars.
This is not the biggest thing in the world. It’s just a longtime pet peeve of mine. If Democrats won’t stand up for civilian Democrats to run the Pentagon, who will?
SCOOP: It's done—Biden has selected Retired Gen. Lloyd Austin to lead the Pentagon, and will announce his nomination tomorrow. w/@laraseligman @tylerpager @connorobrienNH https://t.co/PidjAhC9AQ
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) December 7, 2020
Here is Jim Geraghty writing in National Review about Joe Biden’s Cabinet choices. He says they were going fine for a while, but then Biden went nuts:
First, Biden nominated Neera Tanden to head the Office of Management and Budget, a combative figure who has alienated policymakers and activists on the left, right, and center. Then Biden nominated California state attorney general Xavier Becerra to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services. As John McCormick lays out, in Becerra, Biden has selected a hardline partisan with no health-care experience to run HHS during a pandemic.
….Personnel is policy. Biden may envision a calmer, less contentious, less partisan start to his presidency, but Tanden and Becerra in particular are not the figures that are likely to make that happen. Ross Douthat warns that a “Becerra-fied Democratic presidency, in which the bureaucracy is using ‘public health’ as an excuse to battle gun owners one week and Catholic hospitals the next, will be successful only in keeping the conservative coalition united, loyal and activated.”
First of all—and yes, I’m serious about this—it’s actually nice to see ordinary old griping like this. After four years of Donald Trump’s lunacy, old-school partisan attacks like this are sort of refreshing.
On the substance, however, can I say that it’s a little rich for conservatives to be complaining that Biden has the gall to nominate a few partisan fighters to his Cabinet? I mean, after four years of Seema Verma being in charge of CMS; two years of Mike Pompeo being in charge of the State Department; Bill Barr (!) as Attorney General; Eugene Scalia at Labor; Scott Pruitt at EPA; Mick Mulvaney at OMB; and too many others to count—after all that, plus random firings of anyone deemed insufficiently loyal to the cause, we’re now complaining about Neera Tanden? Please.
Still, Geraghty inadvertently brings up a disturbing point. Back in the days of dinosaurs, it was standard practice for the Senate to allow a president to have a Cabinet of his choice. I mean, that makes sense, even if the president is from the opposite party. It was sort of traditional for one candidate to blow up over some minor scandal or another, but once that scalp was taken, everything else went pretty smoothly.
Is that tradition gone? We’ll see. But there’s more to it. Cabinet officials generally got confirmed because they’re in the media spotlight and no one really wanted to look like partisan hacks opposing them just for the sake of opposition. But there are thousands of other appointments at lower levels who are critical to carrying out a president’s agenda. Those are very definitely not in the spotlight, and if a Republican Senate decides to stonewall these appointments the consequences could be pretty dramatic. The old appointees will mostly leave, but if new ones can’t be confirmed then we’ll be left with a huge number of important policy positions being run by civil servants in acting positions. This is something to watch very closely after the drama of the Cabinet selection is over and everyone settles down to routine business.
Joe Biden is nominating Rep. Marcia Fudge as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. That's fine! That's great! She's great! But I really really really wanted to see her at Ag because FOOD FOR PEOPLE FUCKING MATTERS, it's her expertise — she chairs the Agriculture Committee's Subcommittee on Nutrition, Oversight and Department Operations — and I really really really wanted to see someone who could right historic and current wrongs against Black farmers, among other fucking pressing matters. But housing is good. It's fine, it's great. (IMPRESS ME AT AG PLS JOBIDEN. Ohhhhh, we're going with "the profile in courage — Wonkette link and note that byline! — who fired Shirley Sherrod," Politico? Oh.) — CNN
BLACK LIVES MATTER AND POLICE BRUTALITY
Congress is set to approve a defense policy bill that bars unidentified federal law enforcement officers from policing protests. The bill responds to a phenomenon that Mother Jones flagged in June: Unidentified federal law enforcement officers with no identifying insignia joined in the Trump administration’s coordinated crackdown on protests against police violence in several cities earlier this summer.
The 4,500-page annual defense policy bill that emerged from a House-Senate policy committee Thursday requires any armed forces personnel, including National Guard members, and federal law enforcement agents who respond to a “civil disturbance,” to display either their name or some other “individual identifier,” as well as the organization or branch of the Armed Forces for whom they work.
Asked who they’re with, these guys say only that they’re with “The Department of Justice.” pic.twitter.com/ciVDtP8ndk
— Dan Friedman (@dfriedman33) June 2, 2020
Megyn Kelly Disappointed Activist Movements Me Too And Black Lives Matter Co-Opted By Activists
Megyn Kelly, continuing on her "Megyn Kelly Says A Lot Of Dumb Shit" world tour, stopped by the The Carlos Watson Show this week to share her opinions on Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. They were, as you might expect, quite terrible.
In a clip obtained by The Hill which has not yet been published by the show, she was totally fine with both of these movements until they were "co-opted" by "activists." This is certainly an odd take given that both of them were started by activists in the first place.
Megyn Kelly: Black Lives Matter and MeToo Co-Opted | The Carlos Watson Showyoutu.be
Kelly explained that, at first, she felt real bad about George Floyd being brutally murdered by a police officer who was literally kneeling on his neck so he couldn't breathe, and sort of understood why people might be mad about that. But then people like, kept protesting and being angry about it instead of just letting it be a 24-hour news cycle that we all forget about in a week. And then they wanted serious change to happen in order to prevent something like that from ever happening again (although it subsequently happened several more times this summer), and that was just rude.
Via The Hill:
"When George Floyd was killed I think a lot of Black people and white people were deeply affected by that tape," she told Watson, the co-founder and CEO of OZY."
And when I saw the riots unfold, my first instinct was how can we ask people to respect law and order and sort of the balance of decency when we don't live that," she said in a clip of the interview released exclusively to The Hill Thursday ahead of the full interview.
But Kelly said she "began to feel very differently" as the summer went on and demonstrations evolved and some activists promoted the slogan "defund the police."
"I began to feel very differently, as it morphed into more of a political movement, where to me it seemed co-opted by activists, as opposed to just people who wanted change," Kelly said. "And some reform in law enforcement turned into 'defund the police.' "
It must be said that at no point has Black Lives Matter ever not been an activist movement. It's not like, you know, "Live, Laugh, Love" or some other slogan you'd see embroidered on a pillow in Marshall's. It was started by activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi in response to George Zimmerman killing Trayvon Martin because he was real scared of the Skittles he was about to pull from his pocket.
That was eight years ago, by the way. In 2012. Eric Garner? That was six years ago in 2014. The police have had ample time for "reform." Had they started this "reform" after Rodney King, it is unlikely that a lot of these people would be dead now. Had they started it after Amadou Diallo, same deal. Hell, if they had started it after Eric Garner, they'd be in a real good place right now. But instead of doing this "reform," they blamed bad apples who pretty much never actually faced any consequences for their actions, they waved their little thin blue line flags and responded to Black Lives Matter not with any amount of seriousness, but with their own Blue Lives Matter nonsense.
That's how you get to "defund the police." Which by the way just means taking some of the funding the police get and giving that to social services that are better able to deal with a lot of situations the police have proven themselves incapable of handling. It's an idea that has actually worked really well in areas that have tried it. Of course, conservatives like Kelly have picked up on how wound up some Democrats are about how bad and scary they think the term is, and they're doubling down on that. They're seeing an opening and they're going for it, hoping they can get enough people to oppose just doing the thing that actually works in favor of simply calling for vague, feel-good "reforms" that will never actually happen or do anything if they do.
It is a tale as old as time.
Kelly's take on this is not particularly unique. Conservatives voiced their frustration for months that they wanted us all to be sad for George Floyd as a nation, just not in a way that suggested it had anything to do with his race or the police officer being bad at his job. And certainly not in a way that people were really, really mad about and and in fact so incredibly tired of this kind of thing happening that they stopped giving any fucks and started demanding change or else.
Now, one might think she'd feel differently about #MeToo given that she was, quite notably, a victim of sexual harassment at her old job at Fox. But no. No she does not. She didn't like that activist movement being taken over by activists either, because now they're making all of the men scared that they're going to lose their jobs over nothing.
"It morphed into something that wasn't gonna be all that helpful," she said of the #MeToo movement. "It wound up alienating the very group we most need to have buy-in on our progress: men."
"And I think the reality of our racial struggle right now, in part, is for Black people to ascend in a meaningful way, the truth is you need white buy-in too," she said.
Yeah, so here's the thing about that — there is actually no super gentle way to nudge people who are perfectly content with their position as oppressors to start playing nice. There's no "right way" to "progress" without offending the comfortable in some way. There is no coddling, no use of "When you do this, I feel this way" statements that they are going to find particularly convincing.
Very few people change without actual consequences, and those that can be convinced through gentle discourse to change their behavior are rarely the biggest problems to begin with. The ones you have to watch out for are the ones who will happily do whatever they think they can get away with. It was not as if men like Harvey Weinstein and Roger Ailes simply had no idea that women don't like getting sexually harassed or assaulted and would have adjusted their behavior accordingly were they only aware of this fact. They knew, and they didn't care, because there were no actual consequences. But now, now men who would very much like to sexually harass or assault a woman might think twice, because they have far less reason to believe it will end well for them.
Saying we need men to "buy-in" to not sexually harassing and assaulting us and we need white people to "buy-in" to not being super racist and cool with cops murdering unarmed black people is like saying we need serial killers to "buy-in" to not murdering people, or that we need embezzlers to "buy-in" to understanding that embezzling is wrong. The thing they're doing is wrong already, and they're not allowed to do it, and if they do do it, there are consequences. It's not their choice, it's not about their feelings, it's not about should and shouldn't it's about can and can't. I don't give a flying crap how a man feels internally about whether or not he would like to sexually assault me, all I care about is that he doesn't do it in the first place.
Me Too, in fact, was pretty helpful for a lot of women, including Megyn Kelly. And if consequences are established — including defunding — for police departments that seem to have a problem with their officers killing unarmed black people, that will be helpful for a lot of black people. Once we get that shit taken care of, then we can talk about everyone's feelings.
[The Hill]
https://www.theroot.com/minnesota-city-votes-to-allow-existence-of-white-suprem-1845853468
Minnesota City Votes to Allow Existence of White Supremacist Church, Citing Religious Freedom
Religious freedom is certainly an essential concept in America and much of the world, but it’s also a value that has paved the way for bigotry under the guise of holiness. In 2020—the year that can basically be summarized in three letters: WTF?—a small Minnesota town recently voted to allow a white supremacist church to be established in order to be fair to any and all organizations that want space to practice their faith.
The Star Tribune reports that on Wednesday night, the Murdock, Minn., City Council voted anonymously (yes, anonymously) to grant permission to a white supremacist group to use an abandoned Lutheran church as its third gathering facility in the United States.
The group, Asatru Folk Assembly, has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, according to the Associated Press.
From the Tribune:
Meeting online because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the council kept its video camera turned off, meaning that other meeting attendees couldn’t see the members’ faces. Despite repeated requests from the online audience, council members refused to identify who voted for or against the permit, passing it on a voice vote without a roll call. One member on the five-person council could be heard voting no.
“We as leaders of the city of Murdock want people to know that we condemn racism in all forms,” Mayor Craig Kavanagh said before the council voted in favor of an organization that religious scholars have identified as a white supremacist group.
Before the vote, the council was advised by city attorney Don Wilcox that rejecting the group’s bid to provide a home for its whites-only place of holy racism could open the city of around 275 residents up to litigation.
“There are certain constitutional protections that apply to religions,” Wilcox said, the Tribune reports. “I haven’t seen any evidence sufficient to overcome the presumption that they are a religion, whether you agree with it or not. There’s not a compelling interest in keeping that building from being used for meetings. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean they can’t do it.”
This all leaves us with a few questions, starting with: What the hell (pun intended) goes on in a white supremacist church?
Do the pastors deliver their sermons wearing KKK robes? Do they believe Jesus is white because Black Jesus would have died in a noose instead of on the cross? (They also probably figure Black Jesus would have resurrected three weeks later instead of three days; CP time and all.) Do they put raisins in their communion wafers? If a Black church moves next door, how many crosses do they get to burn before it’s definitely considered a fire hazard? Do they end their prayers with, “a-white-men” instead of a general “amen?”
For a little insight on the group’s ideology, here’s more from the Tribune:
The AFA is among a growing number of groups that seek to practice a pre-Christian, European spirituality. The AFA is unabashedly pro-white, according to statements on its website.
“We in Asatru support strong, healthy white family relationships,” according to the group’s statement of ethics. “We want our children to grow up to be mothers and fathers to white children of their own.
“We believe that those activities and behaviors supportive of the white family should be encouraged while those activities and behaviors destructive of the white family are to be discouraged.”
Not going to lie: For 2020, this sounds about white.
Zack Linly is a poet, performer, freelance writer, blogger and grown man lover of cartoons
Back in October, the leadership of the Unitarian Universalist Church (not to be confused with the Unarians) in Charlottesville, Virginia, wrote a letter to the Charlottesville Police Department. Church leaders complained police harassed a member of their church, a 68-year-old Black man named Walter Huffman, after a woman reported seeing him walking on the sidewalk in front of her house.
On October 7th our church member and Chair of our Grounds Committee was walking up Rugby Road to participate in a work party to clean our playground. Just as he reached the edge of the church property, a police car pulled up and the officer asked what he was doing in the neighborhood. Within several minutes five police cars surrounded him.
A neighbor, who is a UVA student, called to say a black man was walking up the sidewalk in front of her house.
Police stated that they were concerned about recent break-ins in the neighborhood and they had a picture of a suspect. The suspect looked nothing like our church member, other than both men are black. Even after the police acknowledged that our member was not the suspect, they still demanded his Social Security number and identification. One of the officers even suggested that he walk another way to church!
The police withdrew only when another church member, a white lady, concerned there may have been a traffic accident, walked over to investigate the situation.
The church did not ask for anyone to be fired, they merely asked for an apology.
But now, following an "investigation" of the incident by the Charlottesville Police Department, the chief of police is calling for an apology from the church, or for the entire church leadership — Interim Reverend Dr. Linda Olson Peebles in particular — to be terminated. In fact, she held a 30-minute press conference not only to dispute the church's claims, but to list literally everyone on the church's board and demand that they each be "held accountable" for unfairly accusing her department of racial bias.
Via CVille Tomorrow:
Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney called for the leaders of a local church who accused officers of racial profiling in October to "apologize or to be terminated," saying their actions were "race baiting."
The call came during a news conference Thursday in which Brackney played portions of body-worn camera footage that she said refuted allegations laid by the Unitarian Universalist Church and its reverend, Linda Olson Peebles.
"The complaint highlights the power of community members here seeking to leverage their privilege and self-serving agendas," Brackney said. "Rev. Olson Peebles' [and] the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Charlottesville's allegations were irresponsible and preyed upon national headlines in order to gain the spotlight. This should not be tolerated by this community."
CPD had conducted an internal affairs investigation into the complaint and determined the officers involved had done nothing wrong.
The church responded by saying that they are concerned by findings in the report, which they do not feel jive with what their church member reported.
Leaders of the congregation who have talked with our member about what happened are concerned with these findings. The CPD report has a number of discrepancies between the testimony of the police and the account of our church member. The church member's response to the police report is that it was what is to be expected. He now tells us he is not interested in addressing this any longer, and has asked us to not take any further efforts to address his particular situation. We ask everyone in our congregation to respect this congregant's wishes.
To be fair, there's a lot that is maybe not necessarily correct on both ends here. Mr. Huffman reportedly contacted the police to tell them that the church may have had some of the details wrong, and video of the incident does appear to show that is the case.
It's clear that the most wrong person here — at least initially — is the woman who called 911 claiming that Mr. Huffman was literally trying to break into her house and that he had previously robbed her neighbor's house. Which, you know, he hadn't.
In fact, the police officers speaking to Mr. Huffman said that the suspects in the case were 15 or 16 years old. Now, while Mr. Huffman could certainly pass for younger than his 68 years, he's definitely not a high school sophomore. It's clear that the caller was just thinking "Oh, a black man walking on the sidewalk, guess he's here to rob my house."
If the police officers asked for his identification and Social Security number, that is also obviously a problem. That's not shown on the bodycam footage shown, but if that occurred, that is positively bizarre. Why would police need to know anyone's Social Security number?
The most unsettling part of this, however, is that the chief of police literally listed out the names of the church leadership who signed the letter of complaint and demanding they be terminated. For complaining. About the police. That's legitimately scary, and not just in regards to this particular incident. People should be able to register complaints about the police department without having to fear that kind of retribution.
Here's the thing. Let's say the Charlottesville Police Department, in this case, didn't do anything too wrong. Let's say there was a failure to communicate. They still can't really fault people for believing they did do something wrong. In February of this year, a report on racial bias in the Charlottesville Police Department found that it was significant enough to "erode trust among Black residents regarding the justice process."
When you do a thing over and over again, people are going to be a hell of a lot less likely to give you the benefit of the doubt. Because they don't trust you and have absolutely no reason to trust you.
The police, in this case, kept talking about how the resident who called the police on Huffman was scared and how the neighborhood was on edge because there had been a number of robberies in the area, and that this is why she called the cops upon seeing Huffman on the sidewalk walking to church. They were able to empathize with her and understand why she might have done that. They told Huffman not to use shortcuts during this time when the neighborhood was "on edge" about the burglaries.
Yet, somehow, they are not able to take their understanding of that situation and figure out that people are "on edge" about the Charlottesville Police Department and therefore might be less than generous with their interpretations of events involving the police and racial bias. They are not able to understand that this distrust may mean that more people may be likely to register complaints about the police department and that discouraging those complaints by publicly pillorying those who make them may not be productive.
(Eliana Rodgers for The Post)
Black Americans donate a higher share of their wealth than Whites
Despite a wealth gap, each year, Black donors give away 25 percent more of their incomes than White donors, according to a 2012 report.
Gloria Richardson pushed aside a bayonet as a ’60s civil rights activist. Now 98, she wants the new generation to fight on. |
How a Black Lives Matter co-creator built a movement from a hashtag |
THE RANDOMIZED RANDOMIZATION OF THE RANDOM CONTENT
Finally, Some More Science Might Explain Those Mysterious “Microwave Attacks” on US Diplomats
Scientists blame “directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy” for “Havana syndrome.”
A team of experts advising the government have partially explained the so-called Havana syndrome, the mysterious neurological condition that has afflicted US spies and State Department staff stationed in Cuba, China, and elsewhere since 2016.
A new 77-page report by a committee of 19 experts was issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and commissioned by the State Department. It concludes that “directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy” is “the most plausible mechanism” for the illness reported by government personnel.
The victims of these attacks—it is not clear exactly how many people were affected—have suffered from dizziness, fatigue, headaches, and loss of hearing, memory, and balance. Some have recovered, while others were forced to retire early.
The report indicates, without stating directly, that US personal stationed in Havana in 2016, and Guangzhou, China, in 2017, were deliberately attacked with a secret weapon that deploys technology US agencies don’t fully understand.
“For some of these patients, their case began with the sudden onset of a loud noise, perceived to have directional features, and accompanied by pain in one or both ears or across a broad region of the head, and in some cases, a sensation of head pressure or vibration, dizziness, followed in some cases by tinnitus, visual problems, vertigo, and cognitive difficulties,” the report says.
This condition too, is new: “This constellation of clinical features is unlike any disorder in the neurological or general medical literature,” wrote David Relman, a Standford microbiologist who chaired the committee.
Noting that US officials have described varied incidents and differences in symptoms, the report leaves open the possibility that “psychological and social factors” were also involved
Intelligence officials quoted in GQ Magazine, the New York Times, and NBC News have said they suspect that Russian intelligence agents are behind the attacks. CIA officers traveling to discuss countering Russia covert operations with foreign agencies are among the Americans attacked, according to those reports. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson has called these allegations “absolutely absurd and bizarre.”
The new report does not speculate on who may have carried out the attacks. But it does note that there has been “significant research in Russia/USSR into the effects of pulsed, rather than continuous wave [radiofrequency] exposures.”
The report is the most comprehensive assessment of the syndrome from the US government, which has said little publicly about the issue. Some victims have faulted the Trump administration for inaction, including an initial failure by federal agencies to grant leave and provide other assistance. People affected have suggested that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has failed to speak out about the apparent attacks on US personnel due to Trump’s deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Voyager Probes Detect New Kind of 'Electron Burst' in Interstellar Space (space.com)
"The idea that shock waves accelerate particles is not new," corresponding author Don Gurnett, professor emeritus in physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. "[But] we detected it in a new realm: the interstellar medium, which is much different than in the solar wind, where similar processes have been observed...."
Eventually, the magnetic field lines propel the cosmic rays to almost the speed of light — nearly 670 times faster than the solar shock waves that first pushed them. (The shock waves move at roughly 1 million mph, or 1.6 million kph, study team members said.)
The article marvels at the fact that the spacecraft are still sending back data regularly from 14 billion miles away, beyond the edge of our solar system, more than 43 years after they left earth. They even detected the original solar shock wave which caused the electron burst "up to a year after the event occurred.
"The wait time happened because the spacecraft are so far from the sun."
Third Monolith Reappears, Fourth and Fifth Monoliths Discovered (insider.com)
And that monolith that disappeared in Atascadero, California has not-so-mysteriously re-appeared, as a group of three local artists takes credit for both creating the original and for successfully retrieving it to restore it to its former glory. "After learning of the second monolith, Travis Kenney had a thought," writes the relationship site Your Tango. "There were three monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Why not build the third themselves and make the triad complete...?"
"It was meant to be something fun, a change of pace from the kind of conversations 2020 has been plagued with — so much negativity and separation among the people in our country."
All the thanks these men really needed was delivered in the positive energy that quickly took hold of their home town. The presence of this now internationally followed mysterious object brought with it an uplifting local pride, as well as a sense of childlike wonder... The monolith's creators quietly made the hike back up to observe people's reactions throughout the day. When they arrived at the top each time, they found themselves soaking in the glow of the many smiles they encountered on faces of visitors. some of whom drove for hours to see the shining obelisk for themselves...
While you may think of these monoliths as another square on your 2020 bingo card, it's worth noting that the purpose of the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey was to further the advancement of intelligent life. Cynics can say that sounds cheesy, but for the sake of full disclosure, I know McKenzie personally and can affirm without doubt or irony that they wanted nothing more than to offer their fellow humans some joyful light in these dark times.
"There was no esoteric agenda," said McKenzie.
"Our topline," added Jared Riddle, "Let's get outside and laugh."
70 miles away yet-another monolith "was discovered by campers on Saturday in San Luis Obispo County in Los Padres National Forest," reports a California newspaper."We were super happy that someone/group went to all that work," Matt Carver wrote in a Facebook message to The Tribune. "It really did make our day to find it! I think we had huge smiles on our faces for the rest of the ride home."
The second monolith resembles the monolith in Atascadero, but the structure's top features "CAUTION" written in red and a picture of a UFO beaming in a human.
But wait! Insider.com reports that another mysterious monolith has appeared in Pittsburgh — "intentionally placed outside a candy shop by an owner who was trying to attract attention to his small business."Christopher Beers, owner of Grandpa Joe's Candy Shop, asked a friend to make the 10-foot-tall structure and placed it outside his store as a marketing ploy.
Grandpa Joe's Candy Shop shared the news using a 30-minute video on Facebook. In a Facebook post on Friday, the shop said: "Come see the Monolith before it mysteriously disappears!"
Within one day someone did in fact steal the monolith, reports the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. But Grandpa Joe's owner Beers whipped up another one to replace it. "This one is much heavier and bolted into the ground. That's not a challenge. That's just a statement."Beers said he didn't report the theft to police because they have more important things to deal with... "That's not the story," Beers said of the theft. "The story is I built something fun and made people laugh and we put Pittsburgh on the map. I'm not worried about whoever took it."
Beers said the new monolith will stay up for a couple a days before "it'll mysteriously disappear just like all the others."
Business Insider reports that monolith jokes have now also appeared in tweets from a wide variety of brands, including Walmart, Southwest Airlines, Ocean Spray, McDonald's, Steak-umm, and MoonPie.
And meanwhile, the headline at one Denver news site reports that "Monolith mania comes to Colorado as local businesses report structures 'appearing' outside shops," citing the arrival of a monolith outside McDevitt Taco Supply and on the patio of Morrison Holiday Bar.
Aliens In Hiding Until Mankind Is Ready, Says Ex-Israeli Space Head (nypost.com)
"Trump was on the verge of revealing [aliens existence], but the aliens in the Galactic Federation are saying, "Wait, let people calm down first,'" Eshed, who helmed Israel's space security program from 1981 to 2010, reportedly said. "They don't want to start mass hysteria. They want to first make us sane and understanding." Until that day, aliens have secured an agreement to keep their moves under wraps, said Eshed, noting that the extraterrestrials come in peace.
"There's an agreement between the U.S. government and the aliens. They signed a contract with us to do experiments here. They, too, are researching and trying to understand the whole fabric of the universe, and they want us as helpers." One of the hubs of the cooperation is a base on Mars -- where, by the way, Eshed claims American astronauts have already set foot. "There's an underground base in the depths of Mars, where their representatives are, and also our American astronauts," Eshed reportedly said.Eshed added: "If I had come up with what I'm saying today five years ago, I would have been hospitalized. Wherever I've gone with this in academia, they've said, 'The man has lost his mind,'" he reportedly said. "Today they're already talking differently. I have nothing to lose. I've received my degrees and awards, I am respected in universities abroad, where the trend is also changing."
First Electric Air Taxis Set To Fly in Singapore by 2023 (bloomberg.com)
THE ESSENTIAL EIGHT
1. Men may have been able to eclipse ageism, but women in hip hop are still obscured by it. [Ayanna Costley]
2. Harry Styles’ Vogue cover shows that few things can scorch the internet as much as a man in a dress. [Dejan Jotanovic]
3. In season 4 of Big Mouth, anxiety takes center stage. [Rachel Charlene Lewis]
4. Though president Barack Obama’s political ideology has not changed over the last decade, recent anger over his views illustrates that public opinion of him certainly has. [Mary Retta]
5. Hillbilly Elegy is a spectacular failure. [Alana Anton]
6. Rethinking accountability in the age of abolition. [Mariame Kaba, Josie Duffy Rice, Reina Sultan]
7. Elliot Page’s coming out illuminates the complexity of pronouns. [Sarah Cavar]
8. #MeToobin reveals how little we’ve moved the needle on workplace harassment. [Gwen Snyder]
Scientists Say They Have Come Up With a Potential Way To Make Oxygen On Mars (cnn.com)
On Mars, oxygen is only 0.13% of the atmosphere, compared to 21% of the Earth's atmosphere. The MOXIE system essentially produces oxygen like a tree -- pulling in the Martian air with a pump and using an electrochemical process to separate two oxygen atoms from each molecule of carbon dioxide, or CO2. The experimental technique proposed by Vijay Ramani and his colleagues uses a completely different resource -- salty water in lakes beneath the Martian surface. "The presence of the brine is fortuitous because it lowers freezing point of the water. You take the salty, brackish water and electrolyze that. Our process takes the water and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen," Ramani said. The method proposed in the new paper, however, assumes that these brines are readily available on Mars, said Michael Hecht, NASA's principal investigator for MOXIE and associate director for research management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory.The study has been published in the journal PNAS.
Hidden Symmetry Could Be Key To More Robust Quantum Systems, Researchers Find (phys.org)
Their results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, open a new window into the mysterious quantum world that could revolutionize future technology by preserving quantum effects in noisy environments, which is the single biggest hurdle for developing such technology. Harnessing this capability will be at the heart of ultrafast quantum computers. [...] Now, Dutta and his co-author Professor Nigel Cooper have discovered a robust quantum system where multiple pairs of qubits remain entangled even with a lot of noise. They modeled an atomic system in a lattice formation, where atoms strongly interact with each other, hopping from one site of the lattice to another. The authors found if noise were added in the middle of the lattice, it didn't affect entangled particles between left and right sides. This surprising feature results from a special type of symmetry that conserves the number of such entangled pairs.
They showed this hidden symmetry protects the entangled pairs and allows their number to be controlled from zero to a large maximum value. Similar conclusions can be applied to a broad class of physical systems and can be realized with already existing ingredients in experimental platforms, paving the way to controllable entanglement in a noisy environment. The researchers are hoping to confirm their theoretical findings with experiments within the next year.
Check out this slick bunker pad below Vegas! (Wil Wheaton Tumblr)
NEW WHALE SPECIES! (Maybe!) — USA Today
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/12/lunchtime-photo-718/
Here’s a smiling underwater hippo at the San Diego Zoo. This is another shot that I was able to get only because of my giant rubber lens hood. Without it, the reflections off the glass were so glaring that you could hardly make out anything in the water.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2012.16 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1993 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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