Last Call Fot The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

 President Joe Biden Manchin doesn't want to seem like villain in the Good Package's public execution, so he's willing to come up a bit on his bottom line number, but he's still going to singlehandedly cut close to two trillion off the Biden Build Back Better plan.

Centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) on Tuesday signaled he is open to a budget reconciliation bill in the ballpark of $1.9 trillion to $2.2 trillion, above the limit he set just last week of $1.5 trillion.

Manchin and his fellow moderate Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) are still far apart from liberals such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who thought the upper chamber had a deal to spend $3.5 trillion on President Biden’s human infrastructure package, but the two sides are inching closer.“ 

I’m not ruling anything out, but the bottom line is I want to make sure that we’re strategic and we do the right job and we don’t basically add more to the concerns we have right now,” Manchin told reporters Tuesday.

It was a small departure from his position last week when he announced: “My top-line has been $1.5 [trillion].”

He also told reporters last week that he doesn’t want “to change our whole society to an entitlement mentality.”

Manchin’s comments last week sparked a backlash from progressives, though his Democratic Senate colleagues have been careful not to criticize him for fear of angering a key vote.

But while Manchin has signaled some flexibility on the top-line number, there are a number of significant disagreements still to resolve with fellow Democrats.

One major sticking point is his insistence that the reconciliation bill include the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits using federal funds for abortion expenses.

Warren has criticized the Hyde Amendment as disproportionately affecting low-income women since it prohibits Medicaid from funding abortion.

Another major difference is Manchin’s insistence that natural gas be eligible for grants under the $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, a core component of the reconciliation bill’s attempt to combat climate change.

Environmentalists and congressional Democrats have slammed electricity production from natural gas without the use of carbon-capture technology as wholly unproductive to the goal of stopping global warming.

Manchin has also balked at a carbon tax, an idea being pushed hard by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Chris Coons (D-Del.) and other Democrats. The West Virginia senator is worried it could be used to eliminate jobs in the coal industry, which historically has been a major employer in his state.

 

It's these details where Manchin will score a complete victory, and it'll be up to the rest of the Dems to take what he allows to be offered, or get nothing, because it's very clear Manchin is willing to scrap the entire package. He can retire if he wants to rather than deal with any primary attempts, and it's not like any other Democrat could win his seat back in my lifetime. 

He knows he's holding 100% of the cards, and it's Democrats who allowed him to have this power.

There's a lesson to be learned here.

Watching The Watchmen, Con't

 Gotta love it when the feds step in to deal with corrupt NYPD cops.

Federal investigators descended Tuesday on the Lower Manhattan headquarters of the NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association, the union headed by fiery and controversial president Ed Mullins, the Daily News has learned.

While the details of the probe remained under wraps, an FBI spokeswoman confirmed to The News that the agency was “carrying out a law enforcement action in connection with an ongoing investigation” into the SBA.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.

The union is headed by Mullins, a brash leader known for his over-the-top social media attacks on NYPD leadership and Mayor de Blasio. Mullins, a member of the NYPD since January 1982, took over as head of the SBA on July 1, 2002.

“No comment for now,” said Mullins’ lawyer Andrew Quinn about the morning raid. The typically outspoken Mullins could not immediately be reached for a response.

He came under fire in 2020 when he posted the arrest report of de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara de Blasio, on social media following her arrest during George Floyd protests. Mullins was hit with departmental charges for the violation of NYPD rules.

In another instance during the pandemic, Mullins tweeted that the city’s health commissioner was a “b---h” who had “blood on her hands” after she sparred with the NYPD over half a million hospital-grade face masks.

In a piece written earlier this summer for the MailOnline, the Greenwich Village native tore into the soon-to-depart mayor’s two terms in City Hall.

“Since first taking office in 2014, de Blasio’s incendiary anti-police rhetoric has already resulted in three police officers being executed while sitting in police vehicles, Molotov cocktails being lobbed at officers and into police vehicles, armed assaults on police facilities, cops being pelted with debris, and wholesale damage to police and public property,” he wrote.

 

I understand that unions are badly needed in the US to give workers power, but police unions exist to protect cops who murder Black and brown folk, period. And there's no goddamn way Ed Mullins remains the head of the NYPD SBA for 20 years without being part and parcel of that systemic corruption.

I hope the feds fry Mullins and all these bastards up, because they've been helping to cover up literally thousands of police murders of Americans over the decades.

Police killed roughly 30,800 people between 1980 to 2018, about 17,000 more than what’s recorded in a federal database on police killings, according to a new study published Thursday.

In their report, researchers at the University of Washington pointed to clerical errors as well as "substantial" conflicts of interest between medical examiners and police as reasons for the major discrepancy.

Medical examiners and coroners may face pressure to underreport police killings because many of them “work for or are embedded within police departments,” according to the study, which was published in the medical journal The Lancet.

The researchers compared their data to the National Vital Statistics System, a federal database managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that keeps track of births and deaths.

Activists — and even several coroners — have called out that corrupt relationship for years. For example, back in 2017, two medical examiners from San Joaquin County in California quit after alleging the county sheriff pressured them to alter autopsy results for deaths that occurred in police custody.

Some medical examiners have also been accused of providing cover for police during criminal trials. For example, attorneys for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd in May 2020, enlisted Maryland’s former chief medical examiner to testify as an expert witness during Chauvin's trial.

Despite overwhelming evidence showing Chauvin murdered Floyd, the former medical examiner, Dr. David Fowler, testified that the cause of death should have been left “undetermined.” He also said Floyd died of a sudden heart rhythm disturbance as a result of heart disease and carbon monoxide poisoning from vehicle exhaust.

Notably, a New York Times report in May brought to light racist trends in medical examiners’ diagnoses. The Times found doctors have used the sickle cell trait — disproportionately found in Black people — to help explain away instances of anti-Black violence by police.

 

It's all one huge corrupt system designed to protect cops from America, not the other way around. Police unions are 100% part of that.

 

They need to be burned out and prosecuted. More of this nationwide, please.

School Of Hard-Right Knocks, Con't

US Attorney General Merrick Garland is finally stepping in to deal with the hundreds of threats made by screaming Trump cultists against school board members, educators, and administrators over "critical race theory".

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday directed federal authorities to hold strategy sessions in the next 30 days with law enforcement to address the increasing threats targeting school board members, teachers and other employees in the nation’s public schools.

In a memorandum, Garland said there has been “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools.”

To address the rising problem, Garland said the FBI would work with U.S. attorneys and federal, state, local, territorial and tribal authorities in each district to develop strategies against the threats.

“While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views,” he said.

The action is in response to an urgent request last week from the National School Boards Association. The group, which represents school board members around the country, asked President Joe Biden for federal assistance to investigate and stop threats made over policies including mask mandates, likening the vitriol to a form of domestic terrorism.

The association asked for the federal government to investigate cases where threats or violence could be handled as violations of federal laws protecting civil rights. It also asked for the Justice Department, FBI, Homeland Security and Secret Service to help monitor threat levels and assess risks to students, educators, board members and school buildings.

The group’s letter documented more than 20 instances of threats, harassment, disruption, and acts of intimidation in California, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Ohio and other states. It cited the September arrest of an Illinois man for aggravated battery and disorderly conduct for allegedly striking a school official at a meeting. In Michigan, a meeting was disrupted when a man performed a Nazi salute to protest masking.

“We are coming after you,” a letter mailed to an Ohio school board member said, according to the group. “You are forcing them to wear mask — for no reason in this world other than control. And for that you will pay dearly.” It called the member “a filthy traitor.”

 

I'll give you one guess as to how the Right-wing Noise Machine is covering this:

 

The permanent victimization mindset of the right has been awaiting the Biden administration's entrance into the fray with feverish glee. They know now that they can sell Garland protecting school board members and teachers from threats as "Biden's Gestapo Targets Concerned White Parents" and that will be the rage mindset well into 2022 election season.

There's a reason fascists incite violence from the citizenry and then call it a noble revolution of the people. It's worked for decades in countries around the world, countries that are now ruled by authoritarian monsters of various degrees, but they all have one thing in common: they style themselves as a necessary evil to prevent "the enemy" from gaining power.

January 6th has now become hundreds of smaller fires burning in every school board in America. The fight for institutional white supremacy rages around the country, the granddaughters and grandsons of those who lynched Black folk in the South to stop school integration 70 years ago and busing 40 years ago are the ones leading that charge today.

 

This was always the plan.