Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Republican-sponsored violence against local public health officials in states like Michigan continues, and of course the party of violent, killer terrorists doesn't want to condemn the violence on record, lest they too become the next victims.

 

After Kent County Health Department director Adam London detailed threats and acts of violence against him following his schools mask mandate, Kent County Board of Commissioners members denounced the aggression — but would not unanimously agree to sign a statement saying as much during their Thursday meeting.

As first reported by the Michigan Advance this week, London wrote in an Aug. 22 email to commissioners that a woman twice attempted to run him off the road at 70 mph just hours after he announced a mask mandate for anyone in preschool through sixth grade school buildings in Kent County to protect them against COVID-19.

In his email to commissioners, London discussed concerns over his safety and that of his family’s and described the low morale in the county health department that has faced a barrage of vitriolic criticism and threats of violence over the mask requirement.



I need help,” London wrote in the email obtained by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. “My team and I are broken. I’m about done. I’ve done my job to the best of my ability. I’ve given just about everything to Kent County, and now I’ve given some more of my safety.”

Following the Advance’s story, national media, including the Washington Post, reported on the threats to London as part of a national trend of what health officials are facing during the pandemic.

During Thursday’s meeting, East Grand Rapids resident Tricia Ophoff of the organization Smart Science Alliance, which advocates for masks in schools, submitted a petition with some 800 signatures calling on commissioners to unanimously issue a statement “condemning all forms of threats and intimidation made against local, state and federal public servants.”

“We would also request you do this soon so as to give Dr. London, and all the other officials and administrators who are being threatened, the peace of mind that county leadership is concerned for their safety,” Ophoff said.

Commissioners’ responses to signing such a document varied along party lines, with all those backing the statement being Democrats and those who did not being Republican.

“For some reason, because I haven’t signed a petition to denounce violence, somehow I hate Dr. London and I don’t care about the community; that couldn’t be further from the truth,” Republican Commissioner Stan Ponstein, who represents the city of Grandville and part of the city of Wyoming, said during the meeting.

Ponstein said that he also has received threats of violence while in office.

“That’s part of public service,” he said.

Commissioner Tom Antor, a Republican who represents Alpine Township, Algoma Township, Sparta Township and Sparta Village, reported he has recently received threats and said he and his wife have gotten “vile phone calls” in recent days “from people in Seattle, Wash.”

 

The Republicans only care inasmuch that they all think it's Antifa or something, and they want to see "Seattle people" put in front of a firing squad anyway.  But they won't sign the petition, because they fear the crazies, and they fear their ringmaster. None of them want to see their families hurt or killed. It's fine if it happens to those liberal elitist health mask fascists though.

American politics in 2021 are completely defined by stochastic terrorism and the various responses by politicians to changing laws because of it.

Which is textbook terrorism.

The Big Lie, Con't

Amazingly enough, the Arizona GOP audit of the 2020 vote in Maricopa County found that Joe Biden not only won the state but did so by a slightly larger margin than the official count.

A monthslong hand recount of Maricopa County’s 2020 vote confirmed that President Joe Biden won and the election was not “stolen” from former President Donald Trump, according to early versions of a report prepared for the Arizona Senate.

The three-volume report by the Cyber Ninjas, the Senate’s lead contractor, includes results that show Trump lost by a wider margin than the county’s official election results. The data in the report also confirms that U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly won in the county.

The official results are set to be presented to the Senate at 1 p.m. Friday. Several versions of the draft report, titled “Maricopa County Forensic Audit” by Cyber Ninjas, circulated prematurely on Wednesday and Thursday. Multiple versions were obtained by The Arizona Republic.

The Cyber Ninjas and their subcontractors were paid millions to research and write the report by nonprofits set up by prominent figures in the “Stop the Steal” movement and allies of Donald Trump, but Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan said that would not influence their work.

The draft reports reviewed by The Republic minimize the ballot counts and election results and instead focus on issues that raise questions about the election process and voter integrity.

Election analysts say those findings are misleading and built on faulty data.

The draft report shows there was less than a 1,000-vote difference between the county's certified ballot count and the Cyber Ninjas' hand count.

The hand count shows Trump received 45,469 fewer votes than Biden. The county results showed he lost by 45,109.

The draft audit report says, however, the election results are inconclusive.

Maricopa County Board Chairman Jack Sellers said the overall results in the draft report confirm “the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters.”

“That should be the end of the story,” he said. “Everything else is just noise.”

 

Sellers is right, this should be the end of the story, the end of Trump, and the end of the GOP. Republicans who supported the Big Lie should be laughed out the room, shamed out of office, and charged with fraud.

 

Of course, as Robert Kagan reminds us, the noise is but the opening stanza of the dirge of catastrophe that awaits our democracy in the years ahead.

 

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.

Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll watchers.

The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.

Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.

 

This is happening, out in the open, and it is happening now.  2020 was a dress rehearsal. The 2024 revision will, unless it is stopped, put America into a hell of authoritarian make where the only party will be the GOP, and we will join the many other dictator "democracy" states: the Philippines, Brazil, Turkey, Poland, Russia, where the reality of elections is permanent one-party rule by a tyrant dynasty for decades, cemented by military power.

We barely escaped it last time.  We won't be so lucky in 2024. Trump is setting the stage for a coup if he loses, and more importantly, he's setting the stage to normalize challenging and even nullifying and overturning election wins by Democrats in the years ahead.

Pay attention. It only gets worse from here.

Joe Versus The Orange Volcano

The Biden White House isn't going to cover for Trump on "executive privilege" when it comes to the January 6th insurrection, and frankly I'm shocked that they're not. I honestly figured Biden would bury this in the name of executive power, but here the Biden administration is doing the right thing.

The White House is leaning toward releasing information to Congress about what Donald Trump and his aides were doing during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol despite the former president’s objections — a decision that could have significant political and legal ramifications.

Trump has said he will cite “executive privilege” to block information requests from the House select committee investigating the events of that day, banking on a legal theory that has successfully allowed presidents and their aides to avoid or delay congressional scrutiny for decades, including during the Trump administration.

But President Biden’s White House plans to err on the side of disclosure given the gravity of the events of Jan. 6, according to two people familiar with discussions who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.

In response to questions about White House deliberations over what information to release, Biden spokesman Michael J. Gwin said the president views the attack on the Capitol as “a dark stain on our country’s history” and is “deeply committed to ensuring that something like that can never happen again, and he supports a thorough investigation.”

Members of the investigative committee argue that Trump no longer enjoys the protection of executive privilege, encouraging the White House to push aside institutional concerns about sharing information with Congress and aid the panel in an investigation focused on what Democrats and a handful of Republicans have called an assault on democracy.

“It’s not really relevant because there’s no president involved — there’s no such thing as a former president’s executive privilege,” said Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a committee member who teaches constitutional law. “That’s extremely dilute and not really relevant.”

What Trump was doing while the attack was occurring and who he was speaking with are among the big, unanswered questions concerning the assault on the Capitol.

The debate over the validity of his executive privilege claims comes as the committee is moving into a new, more aggressive phase of its investigation. Having requested material from telecom, social media companies and the White House — and receiving some response — it is now looking at how best to compel testimony and documents from those reluctant to participate.

Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) said this week that his panel will soon issue subpoenas to witnesses and organizations, adding that the committee has started scheduling closed door testimony with cooperative witnesses. A preliminary list of subpoenas is expected to be released by the committee as soon as Thursday and may include prominent Trump allies and White House officials.

Trump has derided the committee’s work as partisan and is promising to fight its effort to collect information and testimony related to the attack.

“The highly partisan, Communist-style ‘select committee’ has put forth an outrageously broad records request that lacks both legal precedent and legislative merit,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said in a statement. “Executive privilege will be defended, not just on behalf of President Trump and his administration, but also on behalf of the Office of the President of the United States and the future of our nation.”

 

Trump has been threatening to use "executive privilege" to kill the January 6th Committee's work for months now.  The issue is whether or not Trump can run out the clock until January 2023 and a new Congress, quite possibly with a Republican Speaker who will end the investigation immediately and bury the results for decades.

It's also possible that this Supreme Court will step in and side with Trump completely.

 

So while Biden is "leaning toward" the right thing, we shouldn't expect to actually find out about anything for a while, even as Jan 6 Committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson has sent out the first subpoenas in the committee's investigation.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has issued subpoenas to two top Trump White House officials, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, as well as to Kash Patel, who was serving as chief of staff to the acting defense secretary that day. An additional subpoena targets longtime Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon.

The subpoenas were announced Thursday evening by the committee, which has moved its inquiry into a new, more aggressive stage after requesting White House records last month and sending preservation requests for records to telecom and social media companies.

Trump and his team have condemned the select committee’s inquiry since it began, vowing to fight its demands for documents and interviews with claims of executive privilege. A debate about a former president’s ability to restrict access to information and individuals has already begun in Washington — and is likely to become dramatically more intense now that these first subpoenas have been issued.

Along with asking Meadows, Scavino, Patel and Bannon to hand over records, the committee is instructing the four men to appear for depositions in mid-October.

Bannon and Scavino did not respond to requests for comment. Meadows could not be reached. 

The legal battle over this will almost certainly take years, so don't expect any of these scoundrels to comply, or for Democrats to take much action when it comes to putting force behind these subpoenas. Republicans will only return the favor in the future, and Democrats know it.

StupidiNews!

• At least two people are dead and 14 injured, including the suspected gunman dying from a self-inflicted gunshot, in a shooting at a Kroger in Colliersville, Tennessee.
• A new Arizona poll finds voters in the Grand Canyon State overwhelmingly support an "earned path to citizenship" for undocumented immigrants, including a majority of Trump voters.
• US Special Envoy to Haiti Daniel Foote has resigned, accusing the US State Department and the Biden Administration of deporting thousands of Haitian refugees back to a "collapsed state".
• US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo says that the Biden administration is considering invoking the Defense Production Act to force semiconductor companies to turn over production data.
• With Fortnite creator Epic Games winning a court order against Apple to open up payment options outside the Apple App Store, Apple retaliated by yanking Epic Games products completely.
  

Last Call For The Kids Are Not Alright, Con't

When kids see their white parents engage in racism by gaslighting, whitewashing, and historical revisionism at school board meetings, they learn to propagate all that against others in school hallways.

 

Parents in the Park Hill School District are demanding accountability for the student or students behind a racist petition last week that they say was a call to bring back slavery.

The school district has shared few specific details about the incident, which originated at Park Hill South High School last week. Nicole Kirby, a district spokeswoman, said Tuesday that the matter is considered a “discipline incident” and therefore the amount of information the district may share is limited, including the number of students involved or the exact details of what transpired.

“We can’t talk about specifics,” Kirby said. “But we wanted to make sure that we responded and let people know that we don’t tolerate discrimination or harassment.”

Kerrie Herren, principal of Park Hill South, shared a message with the student body on Friday, in which he described the racist statements as “unacceptable.” He said “the impact of these sentiments are being felt heavily within our school.”

“We are outraged, hurt and saddened that this occurred,” Herren said in the statement. “This is not who we want to be at Park Hill South. Our differences make us stronger. We do not tolerate discrimination or harassment.”

Julie Stutterheim’s 15-year-old adopted daughter, who is Ethiopian, heard a vague announcement over the P.A. at LEAD Innovation Studio — another high school in the Park Hill school district — on Monday about the incident at Park Hill South. She was “really upset” when she learned what happened, Stutterheim said. She heard from a classmate that it was in reference to a petition about slavery.

The subject was a difficult one for her daughter to even raise, Stutterheim said.

“She said, ‘You know, you’re white, mom. So you don’t really know what this is like.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right,” Stutterheim said.

“And she just wanted to know that ... something was being done.”

Kirby said there are board policies in place with defined consequences for harassment, including racial harassment, and the district is following those rules. In the days since the incident came to light, Kirby said Park Hill has been doing “a lot of listening” with parents and students.

“We’ve set up some opportunities for students and even parents to be able to share their feelings about this and to try to provide some support to them, Kirby said, adding: “This is very much evidence that we have work to do. Because we have a commitment to creating an inclusive, welcoming environment where everyone feels like they belong.”

 

But that's just it. Right-wing racist assholes have made it clear that they do not think Black and brown students belong in their suburban majority white school districts, they do not want them included, they want them gone for good. 

You demonstrate that enough in front of your kids, the kids pick that up and decide that "a petition to bring back slavery" is fucking funny so they do it for the lulz, and they don't care who they hurt in the process.

You gaslight and whitewash enough and you get away with it, and the kids think it's okay to do that, because that's what they are taught, and they want to get away with it too.

That's what all this "backlash against Critical Race Theory in schools" is really about, white kids learning the lesson that they can intimidate and pressure educators into dropping inclusiveness efforts and letting kids get away with treating Black and brown classmates -- especially the Black ones -- as beneath them.

Everyone's learning how our system has worked for the last 400 years.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

More and more Americans are coming around to getting vaccinated, but we're running into availability problems with being able to access vaccine providers and having the time to do it, especially in underserved Black and brown communities, which has still been a majorly underrepresented problem.

Yolanda Orosco-Arellano decided she would get the coronavirus vaccine long before it became available. But securing an appointment for it was less straightforward.

The hotel housekeeper and mother of four worried about her anemia, a risk factor for severe illness from the virus. But Orosco-Arellano doesn’t have a car and needed a vaccination slot scheduled around her shifts at the hotel.

Barriers to getting the shot and information about the vaccines have hindered the “unvaccinated but willing,” who account for approximately 10 percent of the American population, according to a report last month by the Department of Health and Human Services. Unlike those who have declined vaccines, some vocally, because of their politics or ideology, a quieter share — about 44% of unvaccinated people — say they would get vaccinated but are on the fence for certain reasons. Some, like Orosco-Arellano, lack transportation or other means, while others wish to wait and see or don’t know coronavirus vaccines are free.

Immunizing that population could be critical to attaining herd immunity and protecting those disproportionately affected by the pandemic. But public health officials have, so far, struggled to reach young adults, Blacks, Hispanics and uninsured people, groups who are unvaccinated but willing at higher rates.

To fill the gap, a motley contingent of volunteers has stepped in — from nurses ferrying patients in their own cars to retired health care workers manning phone lines to community members passing out educational fliers. Nearly 100 free and charitable clinics across the country, which offer services to uninsured or underinsured people, have forged bridges with underserved communities in an initiative dubbed “Project Finish Line,” aiming to vaccinate 1 million hard-to-reach people like Orosco-Arellano.

Her clinic, HealthNet in Rock County, Wis., is one of the ones adapting to reach the unvaccinated but willing and has offered rides to patients and expanded their hours around work schedules. Orosco-Arellano got her shot in May at the clinic.

“I felt comfortable here,” she said in Spanish, sitting in the clinic beside the caseworker, Alicia Alvarado, who drove her to the appointment and translated for her.

The initiative by clinics has immunized more than 112,000 people since June said Joe Agoada, the CEO of Sostento, a nonprofit that supports front line health workers in underserved communities and launched the project. HHS noted in the report last month that the percentage of people who were unable but willing to get vaccinated has declined, indicating the outreach has had some success.

But the effort has hinged on safety-net clinics like HealthNet that have become a bedrock in their communities but do not receive federal funding, Agoada said. The clinics’ patients include those experiencing homelessness or those who are unable to get health insurance. Before the pandemic hit, the clinics offered vital health care to 2 million people who needed it.

“They’re overburdened by the number of patients, and their patients themselves are burdened,” Agoada said.

Sostento has raised $500,000 for the vaccination initiative, half of what the nonprofit says is needed.

“Free and charitable clinics are vaccinating populations nobody else can, despite a lack of resources,” Agoada said. “To defeat this pandemic, we cannot afford to overlook and underinvest in this group, and yet so far this is exactly what has happened.”

The clinics depend on grants and donations and, during the pandemic, thousands of volunteer hours, many at the front lines of the vaccination effort.

At HealthNet in Wisconsin, in addition to clinic staff driving patients to their appointments, some have spent their lunches or off-hours vaccinating people who can’t visit while the clinic is open. Even the clinic’s CEO, Ian Hedges, has passed out his cell number, responding to texts on weekends to sign people up for appointments.

“That was VIP red carpet service,” he said. “I would have never done that for anyone else except for individuals who felt that no one else was listening or talking to them.”

 

The disinformation effort by Republicans over the COVID vaccine is choking off outreach efforts and distribution efforts as well. There are people who still want the vaccine, but can't take the time off work, can't get a weekend appointment where they are, can't afford to have illness as a side effect and miss hours, have to do other things like raise a family.

 

Republicans are making people, Black and brown folk especially, jump through hoops.  That has been the case for months now, and the disinformation flood is only making things worse.

There are a hell of a lot of vaccine deniers.  But there are also a hell of a lot of people who can't afford the cost in time and travel to get the vaccine, and Republicans are making sure those people are suffering on purpose.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott has served his purpose: being the Black face of "criminal justice reform" for the Republican Party and subsequently killing said reforms for good.

Bipartisan congressional talks on overhauling policing practices have ended without an agreement, top bargainers from both parties said Wednesday, marking the collapse of an effort that began after killings of unarmed Black people by officers sparked protests across the U.S.

“It was clear that we were not making the progress that we needed to make,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., told reporters. He cited continued disagreements over Democrats’ efforts to make officers personally liable for abuses, raising professional standards and collecting national data on police agencies’ use of force.

Booker said he’d told South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the lead Republican negotiator, of his decision earlier Wednesday. Talks had moved slowly for months, and it had became clear over the summer that the chances for a breakthrough were all but hopeless.

Scott said he was “deeply disappointed” that Democrats had walked away from accords reached on several issues, including banning chokeholds, curbing the transfer of military equipment to police and increased funds for mental health programs, which address problems that often lead to encounters with law enforcement officers.

“Crime will continue to increase while safety decreases, and more officers are going to walk away from the force because my negotiating partners walked away from the table,” Scott said in a statement.

Democrats rejected a deal “because they could not let go of their push to defund our law enforcement,” said Scott, using a catchphrase of progressives from which most Democrats in Congress have disassociated themselves. “Once again, the Left let their misguided idea of perfect be the enemy of good, impactful legislation.”

The congressional effort followed high-profile, fatal police shootings last year of Black people including George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. Those killings and protest demonstrations in scores of cities that followed called attention to abusive police behavior and the disproportionately high number of Blacks who are victims of fatal encounters with law enforcement.

Repeated visits to Washington by the families of Floyd, Taylor and others helped keep pressure on the issue.

But in the end, Booker said, “I couldn’t get to a point where I can meet with families and tell them that we were going to address the specific issues that were putting your family member in harm’s way.”

Booker cited support parts of the effort had won from police organizations, and said he was talking to the White House, other congressional Democrats and civil rights and other outside groups about still making some progress on the issue. But he avoided specifics.

“I just want to make it clear that this is not an end,” he said.

 

Scott is lying about defunding the police, but you can actually thank far left Democrats for falling into Scott's trap on it. Any efforts by Booker and Democrats for real police reform would have been called "defunding the police" and would have died in the Senate, and Booker got sick of it after eight months and walked away. 

Exactly what I said would happen on police reform happened.

Nothing.

Black Lives Still Matter though.

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

Another week, another red state with a sub-50% vaccination rate has hospitals full of patients dying from COVID delta while stacked like cordwood in the hallways, this time being Montana.

Nurses fill the hospital room to turn a patient from his stomach to his back. The ventilator forcing air into him is most effective when he’s on his stomach, so he is in that position most hours of the day, sedated and paralyzed by drugs.

Lying on his stomach all those hours has produced sores on his face, and one nurse dabs at the wounds. The dark lesions are insignificant given his current state, but she continues just the same, gently, soothingly, appearing to whisper to him as she works.

The man has been a patient at Billings Clinic for nearly a month, most of that time in the hospital’s intensive care unit. He is among other patients, room after room of them, with the same grim tubes inserted down their throats. They have covid-19 — the vast majority unvaccinated against the virus, the hospital says. Visitors generally aren’t permitted in these rooms, but the man’s mother comes most days to gaze through a glass window for the allowed 15 minutes.

This all happened Friday. He was dead, at age 24, by Sunday morning.

The hospital’s morgue cart arrived at the ICU — as it frequently has these days — then the room was sterilized, another patient took the man’s place, and the cycle began again. In the past week, 14 people have died of covid here, the state’s largest hospital.

“I do feel a little hopeless,” said Christy Baxter, the hospital’s director of critical care.

The situation has played out in hospitals around the nation since 2020. But now Montana is a national hot spot for covid infections, recording the highest percentage increase in new cases over the past seven days. The state announced 1,209 new cases on Friday, and Yellowstone County, home to Billings Clinic, is seeing the worst of it. Last week, the county had 2,329 active cases, more than the next two counties combined.

What’s different from the early scenes of the pandemic is the public’s response. Not so long ago, the cheers of community support could be heard from the hospital parking lot. Now, tensions are so strained that Billings Clinic is printing signs for its hallways, asking that the staff members not be mistreated.

The ICU here has space for 28 patients but last Friday was operating at 160% capacity, Baxter said. To handle the overflow, nurses elsewhere provide care beyond their training as covid patients fill other parts of the hospital. In the lobby of the emergency department, rooms roughly 6 feet by 6 feet have been fashioned with makeshift plastic walls. Ten members of the Montana Army National Guard arrived last week to help however they can. Hospital staffers volunteer to sit with dying patients. Beds line hallways.

“The problem is,” said Brad Von Bergen, the hospital’s ER manager, “we are running out of hallways.”

 

Montana has a total of 1.1 million people, and they are getting 1,200 cases a day. This is the per capita equivalent of Florida having 23,750 cases per day, or California having 42,400 cases per day. The states's vaccination rate is 48%, and it took since July 4th for the rate to go up from 38%. Montana will reach 10% infected before it reaches another 10% vaccinated. Hundreds are going to die, if not thousands.

But hey, freedom.

To die.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

 In Tennessee, school board fights are getting seriously heavy over what white parents are saying is "critical race theory" when it's not, but it's not stopping those parents from expunging all education about race and replacing it with white saviorism for a new generation of Karens and Keiths.

Robin Steenman, an Air Force veteran and white mother of three, is fed up with the way public schools in her community of Franklin, Tennessee are teaching kids about race.

She believes that the reading materials and teachers' manuals are biased, specifically the lessons taught to second graders about civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. Kids leave class believing that white people are oppressors and minorities are victims, Steenman claims.

While her only school-age child attends private school, Steenman nevertheless wants the public system, Williamson County Schools, to change its approach. She and a group of local women calling themselves “Moms for Liberty” recently asked the Tennessee Department of Education in a complaint letter to force the district to scrap that material and overhaul its curriculum.

Their protests have made Williamson County the first test of a new Tennessee law that bans the teaching of ideas linked to “critical race theory,” an academic framework that examines how racism has shaped American society.

The clash in Franklin, a Nashville suburb of 83,000 people, is part of a larger culture war over race and education that’s roiling other U.S. communities, and which has gained traction as a political force nationwide.

It has split parents and spooked some educators. Tennessee is pursuing plans to strip teaching licenses from instructors and cut state funding to schools that persistently teach taboo material.

A spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Education, the agency responsible for overseeing districts’ compliance with the law, would not comment on the status of Steenman’s complaint letter.

Williamson County Schools has denied that the civil rights material violates state law. The district's superintendent Jason Golden and 11 of the 12 district board members declined to be interviewed by Reuters.

School board member Eliot Mitchell told Reuters that Moms for Liberty's complaint was "misguided," and that teaching about racism in America's past does not equate to teaching "that one particular race is intrinsically racist."

Still, the district said it is reviewing the curriculum at the request of a community member whose identity it did not disclose. That review is scheduled to be completed by November.

Another local group of parents believes some of their neighbors want schools to avoid hard truths about the history of American race relations, including in Williamson County. The area is home to former slave plantations now open to tourists. Franklin’s public square, where a Confederate monument stands, was the site of an antebellum slave market and the 1888 lynching of a Black man by the Ku Klux Klan.

Some have pushed the district to address what they say is a long-standing pattern of racial insensitivity toward minority students in this 82% white county, including field trips to historical sites they claim have glorified the Confederacy and soft-peddled the evils of human bondage.

“Overall, it’s a beautiful community,” said Tizgel High, a Black mother of three. “But these battles, they get tiresome. You’re sort of constantly fighting for your humanity.”

Schools spokesperson Carol Birdsong said the district “continues to work to create a safe, welcoming environment for all students.”

In the past year, at least eight Republican-controlled states, including Tennessee, have passed laws restricting how the concept of race can be taught. The issue has become prominent in some off-year elections, including this year’s Virginia governor’s race, and it’s poised to be a major theme in the 2022 U.S. midterm contests.

White parents saw the Black Lives Matter protests. They voted Republican so they'd never have to see them, or think about why they happened again. They don't want to confront the truth, so they are criminalizing it, and forcing schools to whitewash history, to present it as "white heroes saved Black folk from slavery during the Civil War" and that they've been watching over us ever since.

And Black America should be grateful for it, and just shut the hell up about it.

Surprise, we're not.

The Good Package, Con't

It looks like Senate GOP minority leader Mitch McConnell is about to get his next big win, and Democrats are all but done in the Biden era unless a miracle happens.

House Democratic leaders confirmed this morning that they won’t be delaying the Sept. 27 vote on the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill — even though the party’s larger $3.5 trillion reconciliation package won’t likely be ready to go by then. This is a huge win for moderates in both chambers. That effectively decouples the two bills, officially spiking the so-called “two-track” process that leadership hoped would enable passage of both while keeping the party united.

“We will be putting [the BIF] on the floor on the 27th, that’s next Monday,” House Majority Leader STENY HOYER told reporters in a rather newsy pen-and-pad this morning, though he also noted that the vote could slip one day. As for the reconciliation package, the Maryland Democrat said the House will move “as soon as it’s ready” — though no one seems to know when that will be.

The obvious big follow-up question here: What will progressives do? Several high-profile members on the left are almost certainly going to vote against this thing — some, like Rep. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-N.Y.), have made their unhappiness with this new process abundantly clear. But the question is how many, and can leadership — and President JOE BIDEN — convince enough to go along with this new plan?

In a closed-door caucus meeting this morning, Democratic leaders implored their members to stick together. But that’s easier said than done — especially when House progressives view the BIF vote as their best leverage to force moderate Democrats to support the reconciliation package.

Hoyer in his pen-and-pad pushed back on that argument, saying that he hoped “every Democrat votes for both bills.” “I don't agree with the judgement of those who believe that it would somehow compel the moderate wing of the caucus to be more supportive,” he added. 

 

Well, at this point, Sinema and Manchin have all but won unless Pelosi sticks to her guns. The only question now is if The Squad will kill the bipartisan package in the House, and sink everything.

After months of grueling public hearings and frantic behind-the-scenes wrangling, House Democratic leaders insisted they are sticking with their original timeline: They said they plan to vote on a measure to improve the nations roads, bridges, pipes, ports and Internet connections in six days.

The commitment fulfills a promise that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) previously made to a small group of her party’s centrist lawmakers, a move that quelled an internal revolt that nearly brought the chamber to a standstill as it debated President Biden’s priorities last month. With the House’s adoption, the roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill would then head to Biden’s desk, having already passed the Senate.

But Pelosi’s plans quickly appeared in fresh political peril, as her party’s liberal-leaning members issued their own demands. The bloc of lawmakers pledged anew they would not vote on a public-works deal unless Congress first adopted another, larger package that includes major overhauls to health, education, immigration, climate and tax laws.

That proposal, at roughly $3.5 trillion, remains an unfinished product in both the House and Senate, as liberal and moderate Democrats continue to quarrel over how much they should spend. With those fights unlikely to be resolved in the immediate future — and internal party divides only growing in the meantime — the fate of both measures entering next week remained in great doubt.

“I don’t think that the speaker is going to bring up a bill up that is going to fail,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the leader of the nearly 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, said late Tuesday after she met privately for nearly two hours with Pelosi.

“At the end of the day, if we don't have the reconciliation bill done, the infrastructure bill will not pass,” Jayapal said.

The conflicting demands left Democratic leaders in a bind, staring down the sort of internal political stalemate they had labored for months to avoid given their narrow majorities in the House and Senate. Democrats simply cannot afford to lose votes as they pursue trillions of dollars in long-promised reforms.

 

One wrong move here and everything ends: the Biden presidency, the Democratic control of Congress, and American democracy itself as fascist Republicans retake control and destroy what's left of the thread the place is hanging on by.

 

All because Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and The Squad had to win at any cost.

StupidiNews!

• The Justice Department is suing airlines JetBlue and RyanAir charging them with illegal collusion and price fixing for airports in the Northeast US.
• Wisconsin Republicans are suing Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer over funds raised to fight against the recall election effort against her.
• Afghan Taliban leaders are asking the United Nations to be able to address world leaders at this week's UN General Assembly summit in New York.
• President Biden announced that the administration will double its global donation of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine shots to 500 million by the end of the year.
• The FBI had the decryption key to stop the REvil ransomware attack in early July while more than 1,500 hospitals, schools and companies were locked out of systems, but didn't use it for weeks.
  

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

The Trump regime knew full well that there was no election fraud with Dominion voting machines in 2020, and they said as much.

Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.

But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.

By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.

The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.

The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.

According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.

Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found:

• That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.
• That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.
• And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.

As Mr. Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Mr. Coomer.

 

This is of course the Trumpies hanging Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani out to dry in the wind, along with Newsmax, for Dominion's defamation suit.  The election fraud nonsense was complete horse shit all along, and the existence of this memo only proves that Trump was covering his ass when his plan A, Mike Pence stealing the election for him on January 6th, failed. The plan B "voting machine fraud" failed too, and Dominion is set to win billions in lawsuits as a direct result.

But none of that will come from Trump's pockets, after all, this memo says the White House didn't believe any of it.

Of course, it means the ongoing state investigations are all nonsense and garbage too, but Plan C was always to rig the 2024 contest ahead of time with a boatload of new voter suppression and election-stealing measures in key battleground states, and that has already succeeded. No Democrat will ever win Georgia, Texas, or Florida again, and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin Republicans are still trying to make the Big Lie into the truth in their respective states. 

It's still far from over, but of course they knew they were lying, and the court documents prove it.

Stop Calling Iowa A Battleground State

Iowa's as red as Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana these days, and Democrats need to accept it and move on.

Fewer than one third of Iowans approve of the job Joe Biden is doing as president, a steep drop from earlier this year.

Thirty-one percent of Iowans approve of how Biden is handling his job, while 62% disapprove and 7% are not sure, according to the latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll.

That’s a 12 percentage point drop in approval from June, the last time the question was asked. Biden's disapproval numbers jumped by 10 points during the same period. In June, 43% approved and 52% disapproved.

Biden’s job approval has not been in net positive territory in Iowa since March, when 47% of Iowans approved of his performance and 44% disapproved.

"This is a bad poll for Joe Biden, and it's playing out in everything that he touches right now,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer.

The partisan breakdown of the poll shows Biden has nearly no support from Republicans. Just 4% of Republicans say they approve of his job performance as president, while 95% disapprove. Among Democrats, that number is largely reversed, with 86% approving and 7% disapproving. A majority of political independents disapprove, at 62%, while 29% approve.

Biden's job approval rating is lower than former President Donald Trump's worst showing in the Iowa Poll. The former Republican president's worst job approval was 35% in December 2017. Other recent presidents' worst Iowa Poll results: Barack Obama, 36%, in February 2014, and George W. Bush, 25%, in September 2008.

The poll of 805 Iowa adults was conducted Sept. 12-15 by Selzer & Co. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

 

Iowa is as much Trump Country now as the rest of the Midwest.  Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan are battlegrounds, but let's stop pretending Iowa's in any better shape than Kentucky right now. Biden doing worse now, today, than Trump ever did in the state is everything you need to know about the spread of cultism out there.

It's depressing, but true.

September Break

It's that day again.

 

Carry on.

StupidiNews!

• The Justice Department has charged two Trump campaign operatives with illegally funneling $25,000 into the Trump campaign from Russian sources.
• A New York City pizzeria forced visiting Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to eat outside after he refused to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination.
• Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is expected to hold power but with a coalition government in parliament as election returns from Monday show
• US officials are expected to allow vaccinated passengers from other countries to travel to the US, no word on whether vaccine requirements will be extended to domestic passengers.
• The Securities and Exchange Commission is opening a federal civil rights probe into game maker Activision Blizzard, following a California state probe into harassment and discrimination.
  

Last Call For The Road To Gilead, Con't

The Texas Functional Abortion Ban is highly unpopular among Americans, as you might expect.

Key aspects of the new Texas law restricting access to abortions receive a thumbs down from a broad majority of Americans, especially the so-called “bounty” payment provision. The latest Monmouth (“Mon-muth”) University Poll also finds public approval of the U.S. Supreme Court has dipped in the past five years while most Americans support keeping access to abortion legal and do not want the nation’s highest court to revisit the Roe v. Wade decision.

A majority of the public (54%) disagrees with the Supreme Court allowing the Texas law that effectively bans abortions after six weeks to go into effect. Another 39% of Americans agree with the court. Most Democrats (73%) disagree with the decision while most Republicans (62%) agree. Democrats (77%) and independents (61%) are more likely than Republicans (47%) to say they have heard a lot about this new law.

Two unique provisions of the Texas law are broadly opposed by the public. Seven in ten Americans (70%) disapprove of allowing private citizens to use lawsuits to enforce this law rather than having government prosecutors handle these cases. Additionally, 8 in 10 Americans (81%) disapprove of giving $10,000 to private citizens who successfully file suits against those who perform or assist a woman with getting an abortion. The vast majority of Democrats and independents oppose both provisions. Republicans are split on having private citizens enforce the law (46% approve and 41% disapprove), but most GOP identifiers (67%) take a negative view of the $10,000 payment aspect.

“The American public is largely pro-choice, although many would accept some limitations on abortion access. This Texas law goes way too far for most people. The ‘bounty’ aspect in particular seems objectionable,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Currently, 6 in 10 Americans say abortion should be always legal (33%) or legal with some limitations (29%). Another 24% say it should be illegal except for rape, incest, or to save the mother’s life and 11% say it should always be illegal. These results are nearly identical to a Monmouth poll taken two years ago. There is a slight gender difference in support for legal access to abortion, but this is primarily among people of color – 76% of women compared with 51% of men in these demographic groups support legalized abortion. Among non-Hispanic white Americans, 61% of women and 63% of men are in support.

Similarly, 62% of Americans say the Supreme Court should leave the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision as it is while just 31% want to see the decision revisited. Among those who support legal abortion access, 20% support revisiting Roe and 76% are opposed. Among those who want to make all or most abortions illegal, 51% support revisiting Roe and 40% are opposed.

“For most Americans, including many of those who support restricting abortion access, Roe v. Wade should be considered settled law. We’ll probably see in the next year whether a majority of the Supreme Court agrees,” said Murray.

 

Of course, the only poll that matters is what five of nine Supreme Court Justices are willing to state. The Roberts Court will hear Mississippi's abortion case -- setting up the very possible end of Roe and safe abortion access for more than half of American states -- on December 1.

 

The Supreme Court will hear a case concerning a Mississippi abortion law on December 1, the court announced on Monday, teeing up one of the most substantial cases of the term in which the justices are being asked to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

The Mississippi case -- the most important set of abortion-related oral arguments the court has heard since 1992 -- comes as states across the country, emboldened by the conservative majority and the addition of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the high court, are increasingly passing restrictive abortion-related regulations, hoping to curb the constitutional right first established in 1973 in Roe and reaffirmed in 1992 when the court handed down Planned Parenthood v. Casey. 

Roe v. Wade is the 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion nationwide prior to viability, which can occur at around 24 weeks of pregnancy. 

Mississippi's Gestational Age Act, passed in 2018 but blocked by two federal courts, allows abortion after 15 weeks "only in medical emergencies or for severe fetal abnormality" and has no exception for rape or incest. If doctors perform abortions outside the parameters of the law they will have their medical licenses suspended or revoked and may be subject to additional penalties and fines. 

In a brief filed in July, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a Republican, argued that Roe v. Wade was "egregiously wrong" and should be overturned. 

"The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text, structure, history, or tradition" Fitch told the justices. 

 

Except, you know, 45+ years of precedent by this very Supreme Court. Unfortunately the court has been whittling away at it all my life, and it looks like the last few strands will be cut away in June 2022.

It remains that the argument that both Texas and Mississippi want to use to allow individual states to void abortion can be used to void just about all other civil rights enshrined since 1962. We'll be right back to the bad old days, and I don't think enough people realize this yet.

Getting rid of safe access to abortion is the beginning of the road to Gilead, not the end.

The Big Lie, Con't

This month's Bob Woodward/Robert Costa Trump book "Peril" continues to be a hot property in pundit circles because of the salaciousness of Tang the Conqueror's final few months, but as Greg Sargent points out, the book also details the efforts by the Trump GOP to explicitly use loopholes in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to have VP Mike Pence openly steal the 2020 election.

The revelations come from the new book “Peril,” by The Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. The headline: Two GOP senators — Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah — took Trump’s lies about election fraud seriously enough to devote real resources to vetting them.

But for our purposes, the more important revelation involves how those lies were supposed to interlock with the broader scheme cooked up by Trump and his co-conspirators.

The key takeaway: Gaping holes in the Electoral Count Act — the 1887 law that governs how Congress counts electoral college votes — were central to the chances that their scheme might succeed.

The book recounts that four days before Jan. 6 — when Congress counts the electoral votes — Lee received a White House memo outlining how Vice President Pence could scuttle the process.

Because Republicans in several swing states had voted to send sham electors for Trump to Congress, it argued, Pence could simply set aside the actual electors from those states for President Biden. Both sets would be invalid, and Pence could count the remaining electors, designating Trump winner of a majority of them.

Though the memo ultimately advised against this process, it did suggest it as a potential option. And it did recommend that Pence use objections by GOP lawmakers to Biden’s electors to delay the process. The book reports that Pence explored this idea before rejecting it.

Let’s be clear: The fact that these ideas were considered this seriously was made possible in part by the absurd ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, or ECA.

First, because the ECA provides that a state can appoint new electors if the election “failed” — which is defined very vaguely — the idea was to use “election fraud” lies to declare that popular voting “failed” to render a clear outcome. GOP legislatures could then appoint electors for Trump, regardless of their state’s popular votes.

Second, because the ECA makes it easy for Congress to object to electors — only one lawmaker from each chamber can force votes on whether to count them — the idea was to get congressional Republicans to invalidate Biden’s electors in key states. Trump would prevail with a majority of remaining electors.

Third, because the ECA does not clearly define the vice president’s role (as president of the Senate) as purely ceremonial, the idea was to get Pence to somehow rule in favor of the objections to electors, or at least to delay the count.

That would either result in Trump prevailing with a majority of electors, or buy enough time for GOP legislatures to send rogue electors. Remember, getting Pence to rig or delay the count was precisely what Trump incited the Jan. 6 mob to accomplish.

In a great new draft paper, election law scholar Richard L. Hasen warns that we face “serious risk” of “election subversion” or an “actual stolen election.” Hasen discusses reforms that could avert such scenarios, which will also be the topic of a conference on Friday.

In the last election, no GOP legislature appointed rogue electors, a majority of Congress voted to uphold Biden’s electors, and Pence ultimately backed away from the plot. But some GOP legislators did consider this scheme, around 150 congressional Republicans did vote to subvert Biden’s electors, and Pence did explore the outer limits of what he might do for Trump.

 

It certainly looks like the sole reason we're not stuck in a successful Trump coup right now is because Mike Pence got cold feet.  There's not any doubt anymore that this was Trump's plan since November 6th and Pence failed to execute.

That's it. The Republic was spared because Pence is a coward.

Needless to say, the Dems have to fix the ECA or Trump (or worse) will steal the election in 2024. They continue to set the stage for doing just that well ahead of the next election.

The Wisconsin Republican leading the state’s partisan inquiry into the 2020 election results on Monday warned election clerks that they would face subpoenas if they did not cooperate and defended the investigation’s legitimacy by declaring that he was not seeking to overturn President Biden’s victory in the state.

“We are not challenging the results of the 2020 election,” Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice overseeing the investigation, argued in a video posted on YouTube. The inquiry, he said, “may include a vigorous and comprehensive audit if the facts that are discovered justify such a course of action.”

The video from Mr. Gableman comes after he and Wisconsin’s Republican legislative leaders have faced increasing criticism from both their party’s far-right and from Democrats. The right has accused Mr. Gableman of not doing enough to push lies about the 2020 election propagated by former President Donald J. Trump. Democrats have painted the $680,000 inquiry into the election as a waste of state resources and a distraction from other needed business.

Mr. Gableman was assigned to look into Mr. Trump’s false claims that the state’s election was stolen from him by Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, nearly three months ago. The five-minute video released Monday was the first extensive public statement Mr. Gableman has made outlining the scope and aim of his investigation.

The Republicans’ continuing effort to re-examine the 2020 results in Wisconsin comes as Trump allies elsewhere have gone to great lengths to undermine Mr. Biden’s victory. Arizona Republicans are near the end of a monthslong review of ballots in Maricopa County. Pennsylvania Republicans last week approved subpoenas for driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers for every voter in the state. And 18 states, including Texas this month, have passed laws this year adding new voting restrictions.

In recent weeks, Trump-allied conservatives in Wisconsin have shown public frustration at the pace and transparency of Mr. Gableman’s investigation. This month, a group led by David A. Clarke Jr., a former Milwaukee County sheriff who has been a prominent purveyor of false claims about the election, held a rally at the State Capitol in Madison to protest what it argued was insufficient devotion by Mr. Gableman and the state’s Republican leaders to challenging the 2020 results.

Mr. Gableman said on Monday that his investigation would require the municipal officials who operate Wisconsin’s elections to prove that voting was conducted properly. He said local clerks would be required to obey any subpoenas he might issue.

Election clerks in Milwaukee and Green Bay ignored previous subpoenas issued by the Republican chairwoman of the Assembly’s elections committee for ballots and voting machines. Mr. Vos had declined to approve those subpoenas.

“The responsibility to demonstrate that our elections were conducted with fairness, inclusivity and accountability is on the government and on the private, for-profit interests that did work for the government,” Mr. Gableman said. “The burden is not on the people to show in advance of an investigation that public officials and their contractors behaved dishonestly.”

 

Two important points here.

 

First, the declaration that Wisconsin Republicans "aren't trying to overturn Biden's election" is important in the context that the goal is 2022 and especially 2024.

Second, good government practices or not, the assumption that election officials in a state must prove they held the election and tabulated the results fairly, that is, the burden of proof is on election officials to prove they did not cheat, is wildly destructive, anti-democratic and authoritarian. It's the kind of things dictators say right before they suspend such elections as "corrupt" and seize power.

To start at "Elections are rigged" as a social construct is one thing. To do that as a legal maxim, well, that's how you end up not being a modern democracy anymore.

The Suppuration Of Church And Trump

There's little evidence that Trumpism is driving away American evangelical Christians, who still make up a solid one-quarter of Americans, but at least some of them are openly talking about the fact maybe Trump isn't the best spokesman for that whole Jesus forgiveness thing.

Even as evangelicals maintain their position as the most popular religion in the U.S., a movement of self-described "exvangelicals" is breaking away, using social media to engage tens of thousands of former faithful.

The big picture: Donald Trump's presidency, as well as movements around LGBTQ rights, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, drew more Americans into evangelical churches while also pushing some existing members away.

What they're saying: Blake Chastain, the Exvangelical podcaster who's also credited with starting the use of the hashtag #exvangelical, tells Axios that, in the old days, people "might meet at a bar and speak in hushed tones about 'how weird that church was.’” Now, Chastain said, those kinds of discussions are far more public and ripple across larger networks of people because of social media.

What we're watching: There's a growing subculture of the "deconstructed" — a buzzword with a range of meanings, from stepping back from a certain kind of Christian culture or politics, to leaving organized religion altogether. 

Instagram accounts like "Dirty Rotten Church Kids” and "Your Favorite Heretics" are providing an online community for those questioning or rejecting the evangelical church tradition. Podcasts including Exvangelical, Almost Heretical and Straight White American Jesus are garnering big followings.Google searches for "religious trauma" and "exvangelical" are on the rise, according to Google Trends.

How we got here: There were always diverse views among evangelicals, but "Trump's four years in the White House made painfully clear just how deep these divisions ran," said author Kristin Du Mez. 

Du Mez wrote the 2020 book "Jesus and John Wayne," which chronicles ideas about masculinity in the white Evangelical church and politics. It has sold more than 100,000 copies. The differences within evangelicalism "can no longer be papered over with the kind of religious language of 'we're all in this together,'" Du Mez told Axios.

By the numbers: About a quarter of Americans describe themselves as evangelical protestants — that's tens of millions of people — according to polling by Pew Research Center. 

14% are white evangelicals, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, and the evangelical population grew among white Americans over the past four years.
There's no concrete data on the size or demographics of the exvangelical population, or how fast it's growing. There’s also no data that would quantify how much of that movement has been driven by opposition to Trump, versus other political and cultural trends.

In the past five years, the white evangelical church in America has faced its own MeToo movement (#churchtoo) and massive cultural shifts in its pews over LGBTQ rights and systemic racism.

 

I've talked before how religious affiliation in America is stalling out, especially among younger Millennials and Zoomers.  There are a lot more people willing to admit in America these days that they are non-affiliated, agnostic (like myself), or completely atheist.

It's good to see that people are joining churches in order to advance civil and human rights, and it's also kind of sad to see people leaving religions because they realize the people in charge of those religions are wholly uninterested in religious inclusiveness. Then again, it's not like that hasn't been a major problem with organized religions for the last couple millennia or so.

Still, if the numbers aren't concrete, it means that the inflow and outflow are close enough that one isn't overpowering the other, and considering how much damage white evangelicals do in general, I'm okay with that.

StupidiNews!

• 2021 is on track to be the deadliest year in decades for gun violence, with nearly 15,000 firearm homicides as of September 15.
• California power utility company PG&E is warning residents that dangerous wildfire conditions mean that rolling safety blackouts will be coming in order to prevent new blazes.
• US auto safety officials have opened a probe into as many as 30 million vehicles made in the last 20 years over defective Takata Corporation airbag inflators.
• British PM Boris Johnson says internet retail giant Amazon must pay its "fair share" of taxes in the UK and will seeks the means to make the company do so.
• An FDA advisory group has given the green light to COVID-19 vaccine booster shots for Americans over 65, but has rejected the idea of requiring a booster shot for anyone younger.
  

The Vax Of Life, Con't

 Republican "leadership" at the state level in the era of COVID is literally killing off their constituents.

 

For the first time in Alabama’s known history, the state had more deaths than births in 2020 — a grim milestone that underscores the pandemic’s calamitous toll.

“Our state literally shrunk in 2020,” Dr. Scott Harris, Alabama’s state health officer, said at a news conference on Friday. There were 64,714 total deaths in the state last year, compared to 57,641 births, Dr. Harris said.

Such a gap had never been recorded, not even during World War I, World War II and the flu pandemic of 1918, Dr. Harris said. Going back to the earliest available records, in 1900, “We’ve never had a time when deaths exceeded births,” he said.

Nationally, the birthrate declined for the sixth straight year in 2020, and some experts say the pandemic may be accelerating that trend. A study from the University of New Hampshire found that half of the 50 U.S. states had more deaths than births in 2020, compared with only five states with more deaths than births in 2019.

In Alabama last year, 7,182 deaths were officially attributed to Covid, according to data from the Alabama Department of Public Health.

On Wednesday, in a town hall discussion with Al.com, Alabama’s largest digital news site, Dr. Harris dismissed arguments that Covid deaths were being misrepresented.

“We get skeptical people who go, ‘Oh well, those were just older people who were going to die anyway, and you’re just attributing their deaths to Covid,’” he said. “That is not the case.”

Alabama has recently averaged about 60 deaths a day, according to a New York Times database, and only 41 percent of the state’s eligible population is fully vaccinated.

 

I guarantee you that the numbers for 2021 in all of these states with GOP ghouls running the show will be much, much worse.  These buffoons and monsters should be run out of town. Instead, "serious" pundits are asking which one of these clods will replaced Joe Biden in 2024.

Turns out though that Americans are noticing that Republican governors are butchering them.

A look at the polling in California and nationally reveals that Republicans would be wise to come up with a better message on the coronavirus, or else they could be throwing away a clear pathway to a strong 2022 midterm election. 

The number one issue for California voters in last week's recall was the coronavirus. Nearly a third (32%) of the electorate said it was the top issue in the exit poll, which was the runaway for most important. The "no" side on the recall -- against the removal of Newsom -- won among these voters by a 81% to 19% margin. 

The coronavirus being the number one issue matches what we've seen nationally as well. CNN's last poll conducted by SSRS showed that 36% of Americans said the coronavirus was the most important issue facing the country. The next closest was the economy at a mere 20%. 

When we look at the generic congressional ballot, Democrats lead among voters who said the coronavirus was the top issue by a 63% to 27% margin. Among all other voters, they trail by a 52% to 36% margin.

 

And hey, let's be honest: the people who are worried about COVID will be alive to vote in 2022. The people who think the virus is a hoax and the vaccine is worse, well, there won't be as many of them around in November of next year, now will there?