Last Call For Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

The parents of the 15-year-old high-school suspect in custody for this week's deadly school shooting near Detroit, Michigan have left their son to the the tender mercies of the juvenile justice system and are evading the law as fugitives rather than being charged with involuntary manslaughter for their alleged roles in the the deaths of four students. 

 

The lawyers for the parents of the Oxford High teenager charged in Tuesday's school shooting said Friday that James and Jennifer Crumbley are returning to the area to be arraigned on charges of involuntary manslaughter.

The Oakland County Fugitive Apprehension Team was searching Friday for the parents of Ethan Crumbley, the 15-year-old Oxford High sophomore charged with first-degree murder of four students and other criminal charges, after county Undersheriff Mike McCabe said the couple had stopped responding to their attorney.

"On Thursday night, we contacted the Oakland County prosecutor to discuss this matter and to advise her that James and Jennifer Crumbley would be turning themselves in to be arraigned," lawyers Shannon Smith and Mariell Lehman told The Detroit News. "Instead of communicating with us, the prosecutor held a press conference to announce charges."

"The Crumbleys left town on the night of the tragic shooting for their own safety. They are returning to the area to be arraigned. They are not fleeing from law enforcement despite recent comments in media reports."

James and Jennifer Crumbley of Oxford were named in criminal warrants Friday, with each being charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of four Oxford High School students who were allegedly slain by their son. They also were named in a noon press conference held by Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald to announce the charges.

Their case is charged in 52-3 District Court in Rochester Hills, and an arraignment is tentatively set for 4 p.m. Friday.

“Their attorney had assured us that if a decision was made to charge them, she would produce them for arrest,” McCabe said Friday.

That agreement with attorney Smith was sometime in the morning, McCabe said around 2 p.m. Friday.

“Our last conversation with the attorney was that she had been trying to reach them by phone and text, and they were not responding,” he said.

McCabe said Fugitive Apprehension Team officers were out searching for the couple as of mid-afternoon Friday. The Crumbleys own a 2021 black Kia Seltos with the license plate DQG5203 and a 2019 white Kia Soul Station Wagon with the license plate DZH8994, according to the sheriff's office and Secretary of State records.

 

The "more to this tragic story than we knew" part is that the parents completely failed to stop their son from taking his father's brand-new Sig Sauer pistol to school, and in fact made gun fetishization such an integral part of the lives of the family that it amounts to being charged as an accessory to four deaths.

The stunning details McDonald described Friday from the forthcoming criminal complaint against the parents reveal the Crumbleys not only bought the gun for their son, but failed to secure it, leaving it in an unlocked drawer of their bedroom.

Jennifer Crumbley and her son both appeared to brag about the new gun in various social media posts McDonald cited. Shortly after his father bought the gun, Ethan Crumbley posted a photo of it to his Instagram page writing a caption interspersed with heart emoji that read, “just got my new beauty today, Sig Sauer nine millimeter. Any questions I will answer.”

Jennifer Crumbley captioned a post of her own on social media that read: “Mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present.” McDonald told The Washington Post that the post was a reference to a visit the two made to a gun range.

But officials at Oxford High School first raised concerns about Ethan Crumbley’s behavior days before the gun was even purchased: On Nov. 21, a teacher noticed Crumbley using his cellphone to search for information on firearm ammunition. Jennifer Crumbley did not respond when the school contacted via voice mail about her son’s “inappropriate” search, McDonald said.

Instead, she exchanged a text message with her son that read, “LOL I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.”

 

And then of course, they skipped town late last night rather than be arrested, because the prosecutors gave them the benefit of the doubt than never would have been extended to Black folk or people of color at all.

 

Parents of the Year.

 

Par for the course for Gunmerica though. I don't expect a jury in Michigan to convict any of them.

Climate Of Worry, Con't

2021 will be the hottest year on record most likely, and December may be the most record-setting month of the year, with temps some 30 degrees above normal.

 

Winter, by the meteorological definition (Dec. 1 to Feb. 28), began Wednesday morning, but the weather is feeling more like mid-fall or mid-spring in many parts of the contiguous United States. High temperatures are set to spike 20 to 30 degrees or more above normal through Thursday, with the core of the unusual warmth over the eastern Rockies and the nation’s heartland. In much of this area, temperatures will swell into the 60s and 70s.

Through the end of the week, the National Weather Service projects 90 new record highs.

Though the intensity of the warmth will ease by the weekend, there are signs that milder-than-average weather could prevail over most of the Lower 48 into at least mid-December.

Relatively cooler conditions will exist across portions of the Northeast and New England thanks to a steady stream of air filtering down from Canada and the north, but only that sliver of the country should experience the chill.

Warm, high pressure sprawled over the West has already led to numerous temperature records. On Sunday, 46 records were set from San Diego to Seattle.

On Tuesday, most of the records in the West were concentrated in California. San Jose soared to a record of 73 degrees. Modesto, Calif., and Palm Springs both soared to 91 degrees, the warmest spots in the nation. That tied a record in Palm Springs last set in 1949. Nearby Riverside and San Jacinto broke records at 89 and 87 degrees, respectively. Some of the warmth oozed east toward the southern Plains; Oklahoma City set a record high of 75 degrees.

The heat in California caps off one of its hottest and driest Novembers observed. Statewide rankings are still being compiled, but for many stations November was more than a degree warmer than previous records. Palm Springs had an average monthly temperature of 72.7 degrees, 1.8 degrees above its previous warmest November in 2017. The city didn’t see a stitch of rainfall all month long, which was also the case in Los Angeles, Santa Ana, Riverside and Victorville. San Diego reported a trace.

 

And of course all of this will only get worse in the months and years ahead.

That's The Sound Of the (Secret) Police

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is really, really committed to his own statewide police force answerable only to him, which he would never, never use for nefarious purposes.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to reestablish a World War II-era civilian military force that he, not the Pentagon, would control. 

DeSantis pitched the idea Thursday as a way to further support the Florida National Guard during emergencies, like hurricanes. The Florida National Guard has also played a vital role during the pandemic in administering Covid-19 tests and distributing vaccines. 

But in a nod to the growing tension between Republican states and the Biden administration over the National Guard, DeSantis also said this unit, called the Florida State Guard, would be "not encumbered by the federal government." He said this force would give him "the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible." DeSantis is proposing bringing it back with a volunteer force of 200 civilians, and he is seeking $3.5 million from the state legislature in startup costs to train and equip them. 

The move by DeSantis comes on the heels of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's directive warning that National Guard members who refuse to get vaccinated against the coronavirus will have their pay withheld and barred from training. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, had requested an exemption for guard members in his state, which Austin denied. 

Democrats in Florida immediately expressed alarm at DeSantis' announcement. US Rep. Charlie Crist, who is running as a Democrat to challenge the governor in 2022, tweeted, "No Governor should have his own handpicked secret police." 

State Sen. Annette Taddeo, another gubernatorial candidate, wrote on Twitter that DeSantis was a "wannabe dictator trying to make his move for his own vigilante militia like we've seen in Cuba."

The Florida State Guard was created in 1941 during World War II as a temporary force to fill the void left behind when the Florida National Guard was deployed to assist in the US combat efforts. It was disbanded after the war ended, but the authority for a governor to establish a state defense force remained.

States have the power to create defense forces separate from the national guard, though not all of them use it. If Florida moves ahead with DeSantis' plan to reestablish the civilian force, it would become the 23rd active state guard in the country, DeSantis' office said in a press release, joining California, Texas and New York.

 

Yes, other states have state police forces answerable only to the governor, most notably Texas. The problem is I trust Ron DeSantis about as far as he can throw me, especially with wanting a guard solely for political reasons.

And bad ones at that.

Hopefully the state legislature will balk at this, but I doubt it.

StupidiNews!

• The House and Senate have passed a stopgap funding measure that will keep the federal government going through mid-February, defying a threat by Senate Republicans over vaccine mandates.
• Former Trump confidante Bernie Kerik says he will cooperate with the January 6th Committee's subpoena for documents, but only if he can testify in public, he says.
• Google says it will delay employees' return to office over COVID past its planned January 10th deadline, citing omicron variant concerns.
• Trump election fraud conspiracy theorists Lin Wood and Sidney Powell have been ordered to pay Michigan nearly $200,000 over their false Big Lie claims of voting machine fraud.
• A ransomware attack on Planned Parenthood has compromised the medical data of some 400,000 patients nationwide in October.
  

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

When Missouri GOP GOv. Mike Parson's office commissioned a state health department study on the effectiveness of masks in stopping COVID-19 last month, the goal was to show that masks did nothing to stop the spread, and then use that finding to politically pressure city governments in KCMO and STL to drop mask mandates.

 

The study of course found that masks were wildly effective in reducing the spread of COVID Delta, so Parson's office spiked the study and almost got away with it.

Mask mandates saved lives and prevented COVID-19 infections in Missouri’s biggest cities during the worst part of the delta variant wave, an analysis by the state Department of Health and Senior Services shows.

But the analysis, conducted at the request of Gov. Mike Parson’s office in early November, was never made public and was only obtained by The Missouri Independent and the Documenting COVID-19 project after a Sunshine Law request to the department.

The study compared infection and death rates in St. Louis, St. Louis County, Kansas City and Jackson County with the rest of the state. New state health Director Donald Kauerauf wrote in an email that the study’s findings showed the effectiveness of mask mandates and forwarded it to Parson’s office.

The analysis wasn’t included in material the department prepared for cabinet meetings, the emails show. Neither the health department nor Parson’s office responded to requests for comment asking why the data has not been shared publicly.

The comparison showed infection rates in “masked” jurisdictions were higher than the rest of the state in the six weeks prior to the emergence of the delta variant. Case rates then fell below other regions as the surge gathered force in late May and have remained lower since that time.

The statewide data shows that, from the end of April to the end of October, jurisdictions with mask mandates experienced an average of 15.8 cases per day for every 100,000 residents compared to 21.7 cases per day for every 100,000 residents in unmasked communities.

The four jurisdictions imposed their mask mandates in late July and early August, as the delta variant wave was peaking.

Mask requirements remain in place in St. Louis and St. Louis County. The Jackson County Legislature voted to end its requirement in early November, and the mandate in Kansas City ended Nov. 5 except for schools and school buses.

There are a number of variables that impact infection and death rates, the health director wrote in a Nov. 3 email. But the effectiveness of masks is clear, he wrote.

"I think we can say with great confidence reviewing the public health literature and then looking at the results in your study that communities where masks were required had a lower positivity rate per 100,000 and experienced lower death rates,” Kauerauf wrote.

 

Mask mandates saved lives in Missouri's biggest metro areas, but the Republican governor dumped the evidence in the trash. It all goes to show you, Republicans scream about "the science" being true until the science proves their political idiocy wrong.

The Department Of Power (Mongering)

Last year, Florida's state Senate elections were rocked by allegations that dark money interests funded candidates with the sole purpose of splitting the Democratic vote to keep Republicans in power, "ghost" candidates and it worked. Now the Orlando Sentinel has unearthed one of the major players in the scandal in Florida's biggest utility company, Florida Power & Light.

 

Top executives at utility giant Florida Power & Light worked closely with the political consultants who orchestrated a scheme to promote spoiler candidates in three key state Senate elections last year, according to documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

The records show that the consultants who controlled Grow United Inc., the dark-money nonprofit at the center of the “ghost” candidate scandal, billed FPL for more than $3 million days before they began moving money through the entity.

The records also show FPL has donated more than $10 million in recent years to other dark-money nonprofits controlled by some of the same consultants — and FPL CEO and President Eric Silagy has personally coordinated with those consultants on campaign contributions made through their nonprofits.

In a statement, FPL spokesperson David P. Reuter denied the company had any role in the ghost candidate scheme.

“Neither FPL nor our employees provided funding, or asked any third party to provide funding on its behalf, to Grow United in support of Florida state-level political campaigns during the 2020 election cycle,” he said. “Any report or suggestion that we had involvement in, financially supported or directed others to support any ‘ghost’ candidates during the 2020 election cycle is patently false, and we have found absolutely no evidence of any legal wrongdoing by FPL or its employees.”

Money from Grow United was used to promote independent candidates in three Senate races — District 9 in Central Florida and South Florida’s districts 37 and 39 — in an apparent effort to siphon votes from the Democratic candidates and help Republicans retain control of the 40-member Florida Senate.

The controversy has set off a wide-ranging criminal investigation by prosecutors in Miami, who have already secured a guilty plea from the independent candidate in District 37 and filed felony charges against Frank Artiles, a former Republican lawmaker accused of bribing the candidate to run.

That investigation and the Sentinel’s reporting have revealed extensive ties between the consultants behind the scheme and powerful business interests in Florida — but the new records show how closely those consultants were working with FPL specifically.

The cache of new documents was anonymously delivered to the Sentinel last week, including checks, bank statements, emails, text messages, invoices, internal ledgers and more covering a roughly four-year period between 2016 and 2020, all of which were apparently unearthed during an internal investigation by a former FPL contractor.

That contractor, Alabama-based political and communications consulting firm Matrix, LLC, has since sued its former CEO and several ex-employees, accusing them of conspiring with a Florida-based client to work on secret projects and cheat Matrix out of fees. The company’s former CEO has countersued, accusing Matrix’s owner of extortion.

The records — along with a summary of the internal Matrix investigation, which said it had identified “potential unlawful conduct” — were sent in early November to James “Jim” Robo, the chairman of Florida Power & Light’s parent company, NextEra Energy Inc. The Sentinel was also sent a partially redacted copy of the investigative summary.

The Sentinel independently corroborated dozens of details in the records — matching things such as bank routing numbers, employer identification numbers, campaign contributions, transfers between nonprofits, names and job titles, cell phone numbers, email addresses and transaction dates. Many of the details are available in public records, though some are not and were confirmed by Sentinel reporting.

 

So yeah, greedy power company wanted the GOP to stay in power so they'd have less regulation and make millions more off of Florida's people, and in 2021 that almost seems quaint compared to what Republicans are doing nationwide.

Shutdown Countdown, Vaccine Mandate Edition

It wouldn't be December in Washington without Republicans threatening to shut down the government again, this time GOP Sen. Ted Cruz and his merry band of knuckle-draggers say they have the votes to shut the government down on Friday unless the Biden Administration kills the vaccine mandate rules.

 

Leading Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate scrambled on Wednesday to head off the threat of a partial federal government shutdown posed by Republicans opposed to President Joe Biden's COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Congress has until midnight on Friday to pass a measure that would continue funding federal government operations during the pandemic, amid concerns about a new rise in COVID-19 cases and the arrival of the Omicron variant in the United States.

A partial government shutdown would create a political embarrassment for both parties, but especially for Biden's Democrats who narrowly control both chambers of Congress.

Top lawmakers in the Senate and House of Representatives have yet to agree on a resolution that Congress could vote on.

Once a measure is set and passed by the House, all 100 senators would need to agree to circumvent Senate rules and pass such a measure before the Friday deadline.

That effort ran into opposition on Wednesday from a group of hardline conservative Senate Republicans, including Mike Lee, Roger Marshall, Ron Johnson and Ted Cruz, who demanded a vote on a measure to block federal money for Biden's vaccine mandates for federal and private sector employees, which they say put U.S. jobs at risk.

"The federal government needs to feel the pressure of what a vaccine mandate really does," Marshall told reporters.

Marshall said the group wants to see language barring vaccine mandate funding in the resolution to keep the government open but would also accept a vote on a separate amendment.

"We should use the leverage we have to fight against what are illegal, unconstitutional and abusive mandates," Cruz said.

Schumer told reporters that talks with McConnell to iron out an agreement were making "good progress" but acknowledged the possibility of a shutdown if the Senate was forced to observe procedural rules that would require a series of votes.

"We'll have total chaos. It's up to the leaders on both sides to make sure that doesn’t happen," Schumer told reporters.

McConnell did not seem overly concerned. "We're going to be okay," he told reporters.

Senator Kevin Cramer said the vast majority of his fellow Republicans are not in favor of forcing a shutdown.

"What's the outcome that you achieve? The government shuts down and you still don't have a vaccination mandate lifted,” Cramer said.

 

Now, it sounds like McConnell has figured out that shutting the government down as Christmas approaches might actually be bad for the country and for the GOP. Kevin Cramer has figured it out at least.

 

Somehow I think there will be enough Republicans to vote with the Dems over Cruz and his stupidity.

StupidiNews!

• Georgia Democratic voting activist Stacey Abrams says she will run against Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp in a rematch of 2018, but Kemp may not be her opponent if Donald Trump has his way.
• A WW II bomb unearthed at a Munich construction site exploded and injured several people, authorities are investigating why the 250-pound bomb remained undiscovered until work began.
• The teen arrested for Tuesday's school shooting in Michigan has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder along with multiple other counts and will be tried as an adult.
• Massachusetts GOP Gov. Charlie Baker says he will not run for a third term in 2022, citing a campaign being a distraction from ongoing efforts to fight COVID-19 in the state.
• US CDC officials say the COVID-19 Omicron variant has been confirmed in California as the Biden Administration considers far stricter international travel and testing restrictions.
  

Last Call For The Road To Gilead: Endgame, Con't

Wednesday's Supreme Court oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization makes it very clear that there are five votes to overturn Roe v. Wade and end access to safe abortion for half of American women.

 

Midway through arguments in a case that could end with the Supreme Court abolishing the constitutional right to an abortion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked a pointed question about the Court’s future: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception, that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?

There are early signs Sotomayor is correct that the public is turning against the Court as the Court turns against Roe v. Wade. But during Wednesday’s oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, all six of the Court’s Republican appointees appeared eager to push ahead anyway and overrule at least some key parts of the Court’s prior decisions protecting abortion.

The justices were asked to consider a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a law that violates the Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that pregnant people have a right to terminate their pregnancy up until the point when the fetus is “viable,” meaning it can live outside the womb. A majority of the Court appeared very likely to overrule this part of Casey.

At least four justices seemed inclined to go even further, eliminating the right to an abortion altogether. And though Justice Amy Coney Barrett played her cards a little closer to her chest than her colleagues, it seems more likely than not that she will join them. In other words, there could be a majority for overturning Roe.

And even if the Court does not explicitly overrule Roe, it could easily announce a new legal standard that renders Roe an empty husk. A decision like that might leave Roe nominally alive, but that would also leave states free to restrict access to abortions to the point they’re nonexistent in the state, or come up with other creative ways to effectively ban them.

It is still possible the Court will surprise the myriad of legal analysts predicting the end of a constitutional right to an abortion. In 1992, when the Court heard Casey, even Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe, expected his landmark opinion to be overruled. Instead, Casey weakened, but didn’t overrule, Roe.

But after Wednesday’s oral arguments, no one should bet Roe will receive another stay of execution. The two political parties are too well-sorted on questions of abortion rights, the Republican Party has grown too sophisticated in picking judges who will hew to the GOP’s policy preferences, and a majority of the sitting justices were exceedingly skeptical of Roe at Wednesday’s argument.

 

There is now an almost certain chance that by this time next year, the right to an abortion will depend entirely on the state you live in, and for the majority of women outside of New England and the West Coast, it will not only be illegal to get an abortion in those states, but to cross state lines to get an abortion. If that's not made explicit, the next GOP-controlled Congress and President will outlaw it nationally. 

Depending on the reasoning behind the death of Roe, a lot of other rights now hang in the balance, not to mention the looming Damoclean blade of the end of most federal regulatory agencies. It would be a fundamental change in America.

 

In the past, Kavanaugh has sometimes pushed for more incremental attacks on Roe. In June Medical Services v. Gee (2019), for example, he argued in favor of placing complicated procedural barriers in the way of abortion plaintiffs that would make it difficult for them to bring their cases to federal court or to receive a meaningful remedy.

But on Wednesday, Kavanaugh seemed no less eager to overrule Roe than Thomas, Alito, or Gorsuch. At one point, Kavanaugh rattled off a long list of landmark — and largely celebrated — Supreme Court decisions, including its school integration decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), its first one person/one vote decision in Baker v. Carr (1962), and its marriage equality decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which all overruled previous decisions.

The clear implication was that if the Court could overrule precedent in those cases, why can’t it overrule Roe?

That leaves Barrett, who often implies at oral argument that she might take a more centrist approach than her most conservative colleagues, but who also votes with the Court’s right flank much more often than not. Though Barrett’s questions were less revealing than Kavanaugh’s, they left little doubt that she disagrees with essential parts of Roe and Casey.

Among other things, Barrett repeatedly brought up so-called “safe haven” laws, which allow someone who recently gave birth to immediately give up their child for adoption (Barrett herself is the adoptive mother of two children). “Both Roe and Casey emphasized the burdens of parenting,” she noted, before asking why safe haven laws don’t “take care of that problem?”

In one particularly remarkable moment, Barrett appeared to argue that being forced to carry and birth a child is no big deal. “It doesn’t seem to me to follow that pregnancy and parenthood are all part of the same burden,” she said. “It seems to me that the choice, more focused, would be between, say, the ability to get an abortion at 23 weeks or the state requiring the woman to go 15, 16 weeks more” before terminating their parental rights after giving birth.

Barrett, in other words, appeared quite determined to erase Casey’s viability rule. And, while she was less explicit about whether she would eliminate Casey’s undue burden standard, the tone of her questioning was extremely dismissive of both Roe and Casey.

So the right to an abortion is in deep trouble. At the least, the Court appears very likely to overrule Casey’s viability standard — and there’s a good chance it will go all the way to overruling Roe entirely.

 

After that, well, here there be dragons. We're not about to turn back the clock, we're about to outlaw the last 70 years of modernity.

The Kids Are Alright (But They're Worried)

The latest Harvard youth poll of 18-29 year-olds finds that many Zoomers and young Millennials are not in a real great headspace in 2021.

 

A majority (52%) of young Americans believe that our democracy is either “in trouble,” or “failing.”

Only 7% of young Americans view the United States as a “healthy democracy”; 27% described the nation as a “somewhat functioning democracy,” 39% a “democracy in trouble,” and 13% went so far as to declare the nation a “failed democracy.”  

While Democrats are divided (44% healthy/somewhat functioning and 45% in trouble/failed) about the health of our democracy, 70% of Republicans believe that we are either a democracy in trouble (47%) or failed (23%). A majority (51%) of independent and unaffiliated young Americans also say we are in trouble or failed.  

Overall, 57% of all 18- to 29- year-olds say that it is “very important” that America is a democracy while another 21% say it’s “somewhat important.” Seven percent (7%) say either “not very” or “not at all important,” while 13% don’t know. Seventy-one percent (71%) of college graduates agree that it is “very important” that America is a democracy, but only 51% of those not currently in college, or without a college degree say the same. 

 

It's young Republicans, fed the nonsense of a stolen election, who overwhelmingly believe democracy is either broken or dead in America. 

It gets worse.

Young Americans place the chances that they will see a second civil war in their lifetime at 35%; chances that at least one state secedes at 25%.  

Nearly half (46%) of young Republicans place the chances of a second civil war at 50% or higher, compared to 32% of Democrats, and 38% of independent and unaffiliated voters. Level of education (27% among college students and those with degrees compared to 47% for others) and whether young people live in urban (33%), suburban (33%), rural (48%) or small town (51%) environments are all significant predictors.  

Similar patterns hold for those who think secession is likely. Overall, 25% rate the chances at 50% or greater.

 

Again, it's young Republicans driving this, nearly half of whom expect a civil war.  

Some 60% Women 18-29 say COVID has made them a different or very different person from what they were in 2019, it's 40% for men, and Joe Biden's approval rating among this age group is 46% (still above any point in Trump's reign).

Here's the killer though. These kids are a mess mentally, and I don't blame them one bit.

More than half (51%) of young Americans report having felt down, depressed, and hopeless -- and 25% have had thoughts of self-harm -- at least several times in the last two weeks. 

In addition to the majority of youth who express depressive symptoms, and the 25% who express thoughts of self-harm, we also found that a significant number of young Americans are bothered by traits associated with generalized anxiety disorder.

• 38% of young Americans report feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge in the last two weeks
• 36% have been worrying too much about different things
• 32% have been easily annoyed or irritable
• 30% have had trouble relaxing
• 22% report feeling afraid as if something awful might happen
• 20% have not been able to stop or control worrying
• 16% have been so restless that it is hard to sit still

School or work (34%), personal relationships (29%), self-image (27%), economic concerns (25%), and the coronavirus (24%) are the five most popular responses given when asked about the impact on mental health. Politics and social media each were cited by 17% of survey respondents. Young females (22% compared to 13% for males) were significantly more likely to cite social media as a problem; young people living in the suburbs (22%) were more likely than others to say the same.  

Additionally, young Americans believe that they are more worried about the country’s future than their parents. We found that 34% believe that they are more concerned than their parents, and only 19% note they feel less concerned. Slightly more than a third (35%) indicate they think about the country in the same way, while 11% don’t know.

 

And I thought my generation were a bunch of cynics.

I've said all along that the young folk must really hate what's been done to them, and what the Boomers and greedsters have taken from them with climate change and austerity. We see here that's spot on, to the point where they expect a fighting war with their own generation of Americans.

The Mask Slips Once Again...

...And House Republicans are gladly saying up front that they can't wait to impeach Joe Biden multiple times for wholly manufactured offenses should they take back the House in 2023, all but promising years of torment and endless hearings for Biden administration officials and Biden's son, Hunter.

 

Republicans can't wait to make Joe Biden's life miserable if they take back control of the US House in the upcoming midterm elections.

Odds are high that the GOP will wrest control of the House from Democrats in 2022. They've got a decent shot of winning back the Senate, too. And House Republicans are feeling so confident that they're already drafting their playbook for taking on the Biden administration once they've got more power on Capitol Hill.

Insider asked some of the very Republicans poised to take charge what they'd do if American voters decide to put them back in the majority in Congress. Their plans: theatrical oversight hearings, investigations into Hunter Biden's art sales, and maybe even one or more Biden impeachments.

"No government agency will want to receive a letter from us," said Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who is now the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee and is in position to become its next chairman if the GOP takes the majority.

Republicans are making the case that handing them majorities in the House and Senate would allow them to provide a check against the Biden administration. They argue that Democratic leadership in both chambers of Congress has failed to hold the administration accountable so far.

Democrats made the same pitch in the midterm elections during President Donald Trump's administration, and their House takeover in 2019 dramatically shifted the power dynamic in Washington and paved the way for Trump's two impeachments.

"Everyone's frustrated with the Biden administration," Comer told Insider in a recent interview on Capitol Hill. "What they see in Congress now is absolutely no oversight to the Biden administration. Like who was held accountable for Afghanistan? Who's held accountable for the lack of border security? No one," he added. "Someone needs to hold them accountable and provide oversight, and we're going to do that."

 

Oversight Chair James Comer, Judiciary Chair Gym Jordan, Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers, and the one-two NC GOP punch of Virginia Foxx chairing Labor and Education and Patrick McHenry in Financial Services will almost certainly be the biggest clown show in town, and they'll juggle their burning chainsaws and take the country down while they're at it.

With extreme gerrymandering alone more than giving the GOP the expected margin they'll need for the House, unless Democrats turn out in record fashion, it's all going to burn down with these idiots in charge.

The time to get serious about Democratic primaries and House races was three months ago.

StupidiNews!

• At least three are dead and eight more injured in a high school shooting in suburban Detroit on Tuesday, police have taken the 15-year-old suspect into custody.
• The Ninth Circuit has upheld California's ban on high capacity magazines, reinstating the ban on a 7-4 vote after a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled the ban unconstitutional.
• Two federal judges, one in Louisiana and one in Kentucky, have blocked the Biden administration from enforcing COVID vaccines for health care workers and for government contractors.
• China says the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics will continue "on schedule" in February despite the COVID-19 Omicron variant spreading globally.
• Union organizers in Alabama will get a second unionization vote for Amazon warehouse workers after the company was found to have violated several NLRB union election regulations.
  

Last Call For Preschool Of Hard Right Knocks

Even if Biden's Build Back Better plan passes President Manchin's desk, there's zero reason to believe any Red states will implement any social policy in the legislation, including universal preschool.

The White House’s proposal to create universal prekindergarten would face enormous implementation challenges, as GOP lawmakers in at least a half-dozen states are already balking and others are likely to follow.

The plan, which is included in the social spending package that recently passed the House and is now before the Senate, would provide $110 billion in federal funding for states to offer free prekindergarten for millions of 3- and 4-year-olds across the United States.

Universal prekindergarten has the potential to become one of the most transformative education programs in the country and is considered a legacy goal for the White House. The initiative comes at a time when an unusually large number of women have dropped out of the labor force and have yet to return, in part because of pandemic forces that temporarily closed or in some cases shut down prekindergartens and day cares nationwide. Meanwhile, worker shortages have hamstrung similar programs across the country.

Yet the success of universal prekindergarten would heavily depend on whether states participated and picked up billions of dollars in additional costs. States have had a very uneven approach to implementing federal programs meant to assist Americans in the past year. Emergency housing aid was hardly disbursed in some states, for example, and in states largely led by GOP governors, enhanced federal unemployment assistance was cut off months before it would have expired.

The universal pre-K program would prove another key test of this design.

White House officials have repeatedly said their proposal would mean that all American parents could enroll their children in free pre-K. But these promises depend on state governments kicking in substantial sums on top of the new federal funds in the legislation to create or expand state programs. Partially as a result of these requirements, GOP officials have expressed deep reservations about participating in the new federal system, according to interviews with state lawmakers, conservative policy activists and other early-education experts interviewed by The Washington Post.

“Legislators in Republican-run states are expected to voice opposition to what they see as a highly flawed pre-K plan and take action to stop it,” said Patrick Gleason, vice president of state affairs for Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group working with conservative state lawmakers.

Republican lawmakers in Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina and Minnesota told The Post that they will reject or are troubled by aspects of Biden’s proposed pre-K expansion. GOP state lawmakers in Texas and Arizona have also strongly criticized the plan, according to conservative advocacy groups working closely with officials in those states.

In interviews, Republican lawmakers expressed concern about the new prekindergarten education standards that would be required for participating states, as well as the risk that funding would evaporate, leaving states scrambling to cover expensive programs.

There “absolutely is going to be opposition from Republican state lawmakers,” said Jonathan Bydlak, director of the governance program at the R Street Institute, a conservative group that advocates for free markets. “There’s a philosophical disagreement that this is not the proper role of the federal government and that this is federal meddling, similar to opposition to other education standards in the past.”

Biden’s proposal would come close to fully funding the expansion of prekindergarten programs with federal dollars only in its fourth year, counting on state governments to make up the difference in every other year. Estimates vary, but the federal government’s plan may pay less than half the costs of providing free pre-K to all children ages 3 and 4, which could make it easier for lawmakers in GOP-run states to opt out. The funding is set to expire altogether in the program’s seventh year, because Democrats have sought to reduce the overall cost of Biden’s spending plan to meet the demands of centrist lawmakers. 

Of course, centrist idiocy aside, if the GOP gets into power in 2025, we won't have a Department of Education to begin with.

Remember however that Republicans don't want an educated populace, they want a stupid, easily manipulated one. They've been winning this game for 25 years now and it shows. Don't expect Red states to touch it.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

As America braces for Omicron Winter, WaPo's Philip Bump points out that MAGA country has suffered the most from COVID and the refusal of vaccines approaching more than 50% of the population in some areas. The death gap in Trump counties versus Biden counties has only gotten worse, and this winter it will only become more pronounced, as well, more are pronounced dead from the virus.

 

It’s worth putting a fine point on a subject I raised earlier Monday: It is red America, Donald Trump-voting America, that has seen the worst effects of the pandemic. With divergent vaccination rates, with the unvaccinated population that’s most at risk being made up of Republicans at three times the rate of Democrats, that gap is poised to grow.

If we break down monthly case and death figures by county vote in 2020, we see that Trump counties have been hardest hit by the pandemic on a per capita basis since last year. If we throw in vaccination rates, we see that it is those same counties that have been the slowest to get vaccinated. As of April of this year, the most red and most blue counties in the country began to diverge on vaccination rates. As of writing, data compiled by The Washington Post suggests that the counties that voted most strongly for President Biden are fully vaccinated at a rate 40 percent higher than the rate in the counties that voted most strongly for Trump.

Those are cumulative. If we look at how the monthly total of cases and deaths has compared to vaccination rates over time, the picture is different. Since June, the number of cases in the most-blue counties has grown more slowly than the number of cases in the most-red ones. The gap on deaths is even wider — even as the vaccination rates have moved in the inverse relationship.

 

It's possible things won't be as bad as last winter as we have more tools now. But the main tool remains the vaccine.

There is no guarantee that this pattern will hold. Winter is almost upon us and, last year, the Northeast got hammered. The Sun Belt was hit hard during this summer’s fourth wave, spurred by the delta variant, and may be less likely to see a surge this winter. It’s also possible that the omicron variant spurs a fifth surge of the virus that slams more-blue counties pushed indoors for the winter months.

All of the data, though, suggest that vaccination plays an important role in preventing infection, illness and death. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the unvaccinated are at far more risk of those worst-case outcomes — which might help explain why more-vaccinated blue counties saw slower growth in deaths during the fourth wave than cases. Hence Biden’s call Monday to get vaccinated with the new variant looming.

But the problem, as always, is that the people who disproportionately need to be convinced to get vaccinated are also those least likely to follow Biden’s lead.

 

And they will die. They will blame Biden for not stopping the virus, as I predicted months ago.

 

It's hard to defeat people willing to die to stop you. 

But it's not impossible.

Gov. Charlie Baker expects a state-sanctioned COVID-19 vaccination passport program to be implemented in Massachusetts and several other states soon.

During an appearance on GBH News' Boston Public Radio, Baker said a scannable quick response code, commonly known as a QR code, would show a person's vaccination status and be made available for others to scan and verify.

"It's a universal standard and we've been working with a bunch of other states, there's probably 15 or 20 of them, to try to create a single QR code that can be used for all sorts of things where people may choose to require a vaccine," Baker said of the passport program.

Baker showed hosts Margery Eagan and Jim Braude his code while in the GBH’s studios in Brighton.

"It's my proof that I've been vaccinated," he said.

 

The problem is where this will be needed the most is where it where never be allowed to be implemented.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

The big story today on Trump's January 6th insurrection conspiracy from The Guardian's Hugo Lowell is different: it directly implicates Donald Trump himself as the ringleader of the tragic events of that day.

Hours before the deadly attack on the US Capitol this year, Donald Trump made several calls from the White House to top lieutenants at the Willard hotel in Washington and talked about ways to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win from taking place on 6 January.

The former president first told the lieutenants his vice-president, Mike Pence, was reluctant to go along with the plan to commandeer his largely ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress in a way that would allow Trump to retain the presidency for a second term.

But as Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January, and delay the certification process to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.

The former president’s remarks came as part of strategy discussions he had from the White House with the lieutenants at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification.

Multiple sources, speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, described Trump’s involvement in the effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election.

Trump’s remarks reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard. The conversations also show Trump’s thoughts appear to be in line with the motivations of the pro-Trump mob that carried out the Capitol attack and halted Biden’s certification, until it was later ratified by Congress.

The former president’s call to the Willard hotel about stopping Biden’s certification is increasingly a central focus of the House select committee’s investigation into the Capitol attack, as it raises the specter of a possible connection between Trump and the insurrection.

Several Trump lawyers at the Willard that night deny Trump sought to stop the certification of Biden’s election win. They say they only considered delaying Biden’s certification at the request of state legislators because of voter fraud.

The former president made several calls to the lieutenants at the Willard the night before 6 January. He phoned the lawyers and the non-lawyers separately, as Giuliani did not want non-lawyers to participate on legal calls and jeopardise attorney-client privilege.

Trump’s call to the lieutenants came a day after Eastman, a late addition to the Trump legal team, outlined at a 4 January meeting at the White House how he thought Pence could usurp his role in order to stop Biden’s certification from happening at the joint session. 

 

This was an open conspiracy to overturn a duly elected President in Joe Biden in order to execute a  violent, insurrectionist coup that would allow Trump to remain in the Oval Office. It was the worst-kept secret in Washington DC. It was an attempt to end American democracy and to halt the peaceful transfer of power.

Trump was calling the shots from the top, giving orders, and wanting options in case Pence got cold feet. The goal was to keep power despite Biden's clear victory.

It almost worked. He had a cadre of followers working on the plan. It fell through because Pence chickened out.

And we're all acting like Trump should get another shot at the apple.