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

The sequel to January 6th is happening later this month, another planned right-wing white supremacist domestic terrorist assault on the US Capitol to "demand justice" for those previously arrested for attacking the Capitol in January.

 

Far right extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are planning to attend a rally later this month at the U.S. Capitol that is designed to demand “justice” for the hundreds of people who have been charged in connection with January’s insurrection, according to three people familiar with intelligence gathered by federal officials.

As a result, U.S. Capitol Police have been discussing in recent weeks whether the large perimeter fence that was erected outside the Capitol after January’s riot will need to be put back up, the people said.

The officials have been discussing security plans that involve reconstructing the fence as well as another plan that does not involve a fence, the people said. They were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The planned Sept. 18 rally at the Capitol comes as a jittery Washington has seen a series of troubling one-off incidents — including, most recently, a man who parked a pickup truck near the Library of Congress and said he had a bomb and detonator. Among the most concerning events: A series of unexploded pipe bombs placed around the U.S. Capitol ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection remain unexplained and no suspect has been charged.

On Capitol Hill, the politics around fencing in the iconic building and its grounds were extremely difficult for lawmakers after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Many said they disliked closing off access, even as they acknowledged the increased level of security it provided.

The decision on whether or not to erect the fence again will likely be considered by the Capitol Police Board, according to a House aide familiar with the matter and granted anonymity to discuss it. No decisions have been made. The board consists of the Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the U.S. Senate, and the Architect of the Capitol.

The deadly riot overwhelmed the police force that was left badly prepared by intelligence failures and has resulted in internal reviews about why law enforcement agencies weren’t better equippped. More than 100 police officers were injured and the rioters did more than $1 million in damage.

The planned presence of the extremist groups is concerning because, while members and associates of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys make up just a fraction of the nearly 600 people who have been charged so far in the riot, they are facing some of the most serious charges brought so far.

Those charges include allegations that they conspired to block the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory. Several Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and are cooperating with investigators in the case against their fellow extremists, who authorities say came to Washington ready for violence and willing to do whatever it took to stop the certification of the Electoral College vote.

As officials prepare for this month’s rally, Yogananda Pittman, the Capitol Police official who led intelligence operations for the agency when the rioters descended on the building, has been put back in charge of intelligence.

In a statement to the AP, Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger said the department was “closely monitoring September 18 and we are planning accordingly.”

“After January 6, we made Department-wide changes to the way we gather and share intelligence internally and externally. I am confident the work we are doing now will make sure our officers have what they need to keep everyone safe,” Manger said.

Still, law enforcement officials are increasingly concerned about the rally and the potential for violence. The Metropolitan Police Department will activate its entire force for that day and has put specialized riot officers on standby, law enforcement officials said.

 

Put up the fences, activate the DC National Guard, and surround the rally with a couple thousand armed troops. You want to act like insurrectionists?

Fine, put them down like it's an armed insurrection. America has enough experience with doing that over the last 400 years, put it to good use for once.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

We've reached the point where local health officials are openly being harassed and attacked at COVID vaccine clinic events by the GOP Death Cult.

Dr. John Cowan cut a lonely figure at a recent Republican rally in northwest Georgia.

Not only because a few months earlier he had lost a GOP primary to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman serving as the event’s headliner, but because he was offering conservative activists coronavirus vaccines. And there were no takers in the crowd of hundreds.

As Cowan roamed the open-air pavilion trying to drum up interest, Greene and other Republicans on stage railed against mask mandates and vaccine requirements. The Floyd Medical Center staffers working the mobile clinic outside the rally, he said, were targeted with “snide” remarks from attendees. Not a single shot was administered.

The hostility toward the vaccination effort was no isolated incident. Dr. Kathleen Toomey, the state’s top health official, said for the first time this week that Georgians aligned with the anti-vaccination movement disrupted several recent inoculation drives — and forced one to shut down entirely.

“It’s wrong. It’s absolutely wrong,” Toomey said. “These people are giving their lives to help others, to help us in the state. We in Georgia could do better. We should be thanking these individuals who are trying to get lifesaving vaccines to our state.”

The harassment represents a new front in the state’s fight against a lethal fourth wave of COVID-19 that’s pushing infections and hospitalizations to levels not seen in Georgia since January peaks.

Even as officials struggle with inoculation rates among the nation’s lowest, these reports of concerted efforts to derail vaccination drives sparked worry among public health experts and spurred outrage among politicians.

“Public health officials are getting booed in places, they’re getting harassed, when this should be a time to come together,” said Dr. Carlos Del Rio, an Emory University infectious disease specialist.

Toomey said she only recently became aware of the disruptions. Her office said public health staff have been “harassed, yelled at, threatened and demeaned by some of the very members of the public they were trying to help.”

In one South Georgia county, residents protesting the vaccinations tracked down public health employees and bombarded them with hostile messages and misinformation about the vaccine.

And a mobile vaccination event in an unspecified North Georgia county was canceled after an “organized” group of people showed up to harass and name-call public health workers, said Nancy Nydam, a spokeswoman for Toomey.

“Aside from feeling threatened themselves, staff realized no one would want to come to that location for a vaccination under those circumstances, so they packed up and left,” she said.

 

Just like the anti-choice assholes, they will eventually start hurting and even killing health care workers who provide the vaccine in dangerous GOP-controlled Death Cult zones. This is escalating fast and the violence is completely designed to stop all vaccine efforts in rural areas, where people will die, and them blame Biden for it.

More importantly though the GOP is doing this on purpose to raise the chance that health care workers quit. They want them out. They want people to suffer as a result and to say "See, this is all Joe Biden's fault, you'd better vote for us."

Health care workers "sided" with the Democrats on vaccines.

They have to be punished, just like any other industry group that "sides" with the Democrats.

 

 

 

The Road To Gilead, Texas

With Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito choosing to pass on blocking Texas's insane anti-choice law that literally allows civil bounties for suing Texas women who receive reproductive health care in any state after just six weeks of pregnancy, the odious law takes affect today, and the era of Roe v Wade is all but over. 

A Texas law that bans most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect Wednesday, as a midnight deadline for the Supreme Court to stop it came and went without action.

The court could still grant a request from abortion providers to halt the law, one of the nation’s most restrictive. But for now, abortion providers in Texas, including Planned Parenthood and Whole Woman’s Health, said they will no longer terminate pregnancies more than six weeks from a woman’s last period.

Providers said the law effectively eliminates the guarantee in Roe v. Wade and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that women have a right to end their pregnancies before viability, and that states may not impose undue burdens on that decision.

As longtime opponents of abortion claimed Wednesday as “a historic and hopeful day,” abortion-rights advocates and providers decried the impact of the new law on the women they serve.

“It’s just really unclear what the future will hold for women in Texas,” said Kathy Kleinfeld, the director at Houston Women’s Reproductive Services. “I really don’t know. I don’t feel pessimistic. I don’t feel optimistic. I’m just right in the middle, cautiously waiting.”

Human Coalition Action Texas Legislative Director Chelsey Youman, who backed the bill, praised Texas as “the first state to successfully protect the most vulnerable among us, preborn children … Human beings are worthy of protection at all phases of development.”

Federal judges across the country have cited Roe and other precedents to block six-week bans in other states before they took effect.

The lawsuits that stopped those laws targeted government officials who would enforce the bans, which proponents dub “heartbeat bills” because they say that is when a doctor can first detect a fetal heartbeat. Doctors opposed to the bills dispute that description, saying the fluttering that is detected cannot exist outside the womb.

The Texas law was designed to make it more difficult for abortion rights advocates to win such pre-enforcement injunctions. The statute empowers individuals, instead of state government officials, to bring legal action against those who help women seeking a prohibited abortion.

Lawyers for abortion providers told the Supreme Court that the statute, known by its bill number, S.B. 8, would “immediately and catastrophically reduce abortion access” in Texas and probably force more clinics to close. The law is unconstitutional, they say, because it conflicts with the court precedents that prevent states from banning abortion before a fetus would be viable outside the womb, usually around 22 to 24 weeks.

About 85 to 90 percent of people who obtain abortions in Texas are at least six weeks into pregnancy, meaning this law would prohibit nearly all abortions in the state.

“Patients will have to travel out of state — in the middle of a pandemic — to receive constitutionally guaranteed health care. And many will not have the means to do so,” Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), said in a statement. “It’s cruel, unconscionable, and unlawful.”

 

But for the first time in my lifetime, the Supreme Court isn't lifting a finger to stop a state law that clearly ends abortion access in the state because it drafts residents of any state as bounty hunters to sue women, clinics, and health care providers into oblivion in civil court.

 

The legal argument is insidious.

 

In response Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said the Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction to act against the law at this point, and that any legal challenges would have to wait until someone actually brought a civil action against an abortion provider or someone who aids the woman.

“This Court cannot expunge the law itself. Rather, it can enjoin only enforcement of the law,” he wrote in his brief to the court, which did not mention Roe. But in the Texas case, he noted, government officials “explicitly do not enforce the law.”

The abortion providers, Paxton wrote, “have not shown that they will be personally harmed by a bill that may never be enforced against them by anyone.” 

 

Abortion is now illegal in Texas in 95% of instances.  And even if the law was blocked and found unconstitutional, Texas clinics will all close, so that number will be effectively 100%. By the time this grinds through the courts, there will be zero legal abortion health care providers in a state with 14 million women.

Expect a score of other states to institute Texas's law by spring, before the Roberts Court strikes down Roe in June.

A full third of American women will have no access to abortion whatsoever in 12 months.

Gilead is here.

StupidiNews!

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• New Zealanders are emerging back outdoors as the nation's COVID-19 lockdowns have been lifted, but schools and offices remain closed across the country.
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• Disgraced biotech wunderkind and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison on fraud charges as jury selection begins this week for Holmes's trial.