The Vax Of Life, Con't

A big majority of Americans approve of President Biden's vaccine mandate + testing rules for medium and large businesses, including independent voters. It's Republicans who hate it, and it's not like they were voting for Democrats anyway.

A majority of Americans — including suburban voters — support vaccine mandates for federal workers as well as private companies, according to the latest installment of the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index.

Why it matters: The findings, on the heels of President Biden's mandates announcement last week, suggest that while his move was divisive, it may be politically safer than his opponents hope.

What they're saying: "From a political perspective, he especially reinforces himself with independents," said Cliff Young, president of Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs."The No. 1 issue for Biden has been COVID, and he’s been losing ground on it, especially among independents ... it should stanch the bleeding ... this is an initiative that could help bolster him there." However, "he wins no points with Republicans. He wins a lot of points with Democrats, but they already support him."

The big picture: Respondents were asked two separate questions: Do you support the federal government requiring all federal employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19? And do you support a federal government rule that requires all business with 100 or more employees to make all staff be vaccinated or undergo regular COVID testing?

Their overall responses were virtually identical: 42% strongly supported both; 18% somewhat supported both; 13%–14% somewhat opposed both; and 25%–26% strongly opposed both. In other words, respondents didn't draw major distinctions between mandates for public or private employees.

Between the lines: The high concentrations of strong support and strong opposition reinforce the depth of polarization.

 

But notice even a third of Republicans support mandates.  That's practically a victory for Biden right there. Vaccine mandates are a winner for the Dems, and the need to remember that. Also, you know, it's a winner because it's the right thing to do and should have been done six months ago.

StupidiNews!

• Tropical Storm Nicholas could dump up to 20 inches of rain on coastal Texas including Houston over the next 48 hours.
• Two Florida teens were arrested after allegedly plotting a Columbine-style massacre at their high school, police found firearms and pipe bombs.
• President Biden stumped in California to back Gov. Gavin Newsom last night as millions go to the polls in the state to determine Newsom's fate today in a recall election.
• Norway's opposition Labor Party led by Jonas Gahr Store is expected to form a coalition government, pushing aside Conservatives led by Premier Erna Solberg.
• Facebook has a VIP list of millions of people who can violate terms of service without consequence according to leaked documents published by the Wall Street Journal.
  

Last Call For Gavin Versus The Big Lie

California Republicans, and national Republicans including The Former Guy™, are already claiming Gavin Newsom's recall victory tomorrow can only be the product of massive voter fraud, and are vowing not to accept the results, or to concede the race.

The results of the California recall election won’t be known until Tuesday night. But some Republicans are already predicting victory for the Democrat, Gov. Gavin Newsom, for a reason that should sound familiar.

Voter fraud.

Soon after the recall race was announced in early July, the embers of 2020 election denialism ignited into new false claims on right-wing news sites and social media channels. This vote, too, would supposedly be “stolen,” with malfeasance ranging from deceptively designed ballots to nefariousness by corrupt postal workers.

As a wave of recent polling indicated that Mr. Newsom was likely to brush off his Republican challengers, the baseless allegations accelerated. Larry Elder, a leading Republican candidate, said he was “concerned” about election fraud. The Fox News commentators Tomi Lahren and Tucker Carlson suggested that wrongdoing was the only way Mr. Newsom could win. And former President Donald J. Trump predicted that it would be “a rigged election.”

This swift embrace of false allegations of cheating in the California recall reflects a growing instinct on the right to argue that any lost election, or any ongoing race that might result in defeat, must be marred by fraud. The relentless falsehoods spread by Mr. Trump and his allies about the 2020 election have only fueled such fears.

“I very honestly believe there were irregularities and fraudulent activity,” Elena Johnson, 65, a teacher in Los Angeles County who was in the crowd at a rally for Mr. Elder last week in Ventura County, said of the presidential contest last year. “It was stolen.”

Because of her concerns about voter fraud in the 2020 election, Ms. Johnson said, she would be casting her ballot in person on Tuesday instead of by mail. She said she was supporting the Republican because she thought California, her adopted home after immigrating from the Philippines 40 years ago, was on the brink. “California is where I came, and California is where I want to stay,” she said.

Since the start of the recall, allegations of election fraud have been simmering on social media in California, with daily mentions in the low thousands, according to a review by Zignal Labs, a media tracking agency.

But singular claims or conspiracy theories, such as a selectively edited video purporting to show that people with a post office “master key” could steal ballots, have quickly ricocheted around the broader conservative ecosystem. The post office video surpassed one million views, amplified by high-profile Trump allies and members of the conservative news media.

Nationally, Republican candidates who deny the outcomes of their elections remain outliers. Hundreds of G.O.P. candidates up and down the ballot in 2020 accepted their defeats. But at the same time, many of them joined Mr. Trump in the assault on the presidential race’s outcome, and in other recent election cycles, candidates, their allies and the conservative news media have increasingly expressed doubts about the validity of the electoral process.

And while false claims of wrongdoing have long emerged in the days and weeks after elections, Republicans’ quick turn in advance of the California recall — a race that was always going to be a long shot for them in a deep-blue state — signals the growing normalization of crying fraud.

“This is baked into the playbook now,” said Michael Latner, an associate professor of political science at California Polytechnic Institute. As soon as the recall was official, he added, “you already started to see stories and individuals on social media claiming that, you know, they received five ballots or their uncle received five ballots.”

 

This is the GOP now. Every win is honest, every loss is a rigged election, even in a ridiculously blue state like California. The whole point of this is to justify the next round of violence. It worked on January 6th. It will work in other instances of political terrorism.

And why shouldn't Republicans claim voter fraud every single time? We refuse to give them a downside to doing so. There is no downside to claiming fraud for every single Republican loss, especially in states run by the GOP. And eventually in those states, elections where Democrats win are simply going to be overturned by Republicans in charge of states and elections.

I expect that in 2022, and I expect a lot of it, including entire state electoral slates, to simply be given to the Republican running in 2024.  You will see states throw out Democratic wins and replace them with Republicans, full stop.

That's where this is going, folks.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Another day, another armed white supremacist domestic terrorist found lurking near Democratic lawmakers with the obvious intent to do harm.

 

A California man, who had a bayonet and machete with him, was arrested near Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, authorities said Monday.

Donald Craighead, a 44-year-old resident of Oceanside, was booked on suspicion of possession of prohibited weapons, U.S. Capitol Police said.

Craighead's Dodge Dakota pickup truck, decorated with a swastika and other white supremacist symbols, was spotted near DNC headquarters at around midnight, authorities said.

The truck did not have a license plate, but instead had the picture of an American flag where the plate should have been, officials said.

Capitol police pulled over the truck along the 500 block of South Capitol Street, SW.

“This is good police work plain and simple,” Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger said in a statement. “We applaud the officers’ keen observation and the teamwork that resulted in this arrest.”

Officers spotted the bayonet and machete, which are illegal in Washington D.C., inside the truck, authorities said.

Craighead allegedly told police he was “on patrol” and expressed white supremacist ideology.

 

At the very minimum he was casing the streets ahead of this weekend's Insurrection 2: White Supremacist Boogaloo mess. The Capitol Police say they are armed, ready, and not going to put up with any crap. 

“We are here to protect everyone’s First Amendment right to peacefully protest,” said Chief Tom Manger. “I urge anyone who is thinking about causing trouble to stay home. We will enforce the law and not tolerate violence.”

Today the Capitol Police Board approved a plan to temporarily put up a fence around the Capitol Building. When the inner-perimeter fence was taken down in July, USCP leaders noted that from time to time, they may exercise the ability to enhance security around the Capitol Complex.

Last week the Capitol Police Board issued an emergency declaration, which will go into effect about the time of the demonstration and allow the Department to deputize outside law enforcement officers as United States Capitol Police Special Officers.

“We want to reassure everyone these are temporary measures to ensure everyone’s safety,” said Chief Manger. “We are extremely grateful for the support we continue to receive from the local community and our Congressional stakeholders as we carry out our critical mission.”

 

So the fence is going back up, but you can count on the cultists being ready to throw down. What I'm afraid of is that they bring firearms anyway, and that people get truly and badly hurt or killed en masse.

 

We'll see.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

People are dying in ICUs, folks. They go there to die from Delta because they refused the vaccine. One such woman who is in an ICU in the Deep South is the aunt of Sports Illustrated college football writer Ross Dellenger, who absolutely believes his failure to convince his aunt to get vaccinated will kill her.

In normal times, the ICU is a dreadful place.

Sickness lingers like a fog. You can feel it, sense it, even hear it—the machinery pumping, the alarms ringing, the nurses scrambling.

In pandemic times, the ICU is chilling. Death lives here.

Medical staff members wear green biohazard suits, face shields, latex gloves and shoe coverings. Strips of red tape—“ISOLATION,” they read—mark the windows and doors of individual rooms.

Behind each is a patient who cannot breathe on their own, kept alive by a ventilation machine that is connected to an invasive tube running down their windpipe and into the lungs. Each room is almost identical: a person, some on their stomachs and others on their backs, sedated and paralyzed, roughly a dozen patches and pipes protruding from them, blankets hiding their naked bodies.

Most of them will not make it out of here, the nurse tells me. In fact, at this particular ICU on the Southern Gulf Coast, COVID-19 patients needing a ventilator have a fatality rate approaching 100%. Over the last year, hundreds of them spent time here. Seven of them survived.

“I wish people could walk in my shoes for a day,” the nurse muffles through a mask.

The nurse is nice, but blunt. She’s frustrated like so many in the medical community, she says. In this ICU, there are 25 patients battling COVID-19. She pauses before finishing the thought: 24 of them are unvaccinated.

That includes the patient before her, the one with braided red curls, pale skin, the one with rosaries draped over her bedside, lying flat on her stomach, her left ear and cheek exposed, a tube inserted in her mouth filling her lungs with oxygen.

She is in her 40s, a mother to a teenager. A wife to a husband. A daughter to an 81-year old mom. A sister to three older siblings. A friend to hundreds.

And an aunt, a godmother and a kindred spirit to one lucky nephew.

Me.

Normally, I write about college football for Sports Illustrated. As the son of a longtime high school football coach, I’ve always been passionate about sports. My stories usually include words like touchdown, field goal and kickoff—not ICU, illness and death.

This isn’t a story about a vaccine. It isn’t a story about a virus. And it isn’t a story about one single person. It is a story about them all.

 

It's a grim way to start the week, but as we observed the 20th anniversary of thousands of preventable deaths from 9/11/01, we have yet to discuss as a country the thousands of preventable deaths from 9/11/21 from COVID.

 

And 9/12.

 

And today. 

And in the weeks and months ahead.

StupidiNews!

• Danill Medvedev of Russia knocked off world No. 1 seed Novak Djokovic in straight sets on Sunday to win the US Open and deny Djokovich the first calendar grand slam since 1969.
• The FDA's top vaccine official is hopeful that children ages 5-12 can start being vaccinated against COVID-19 as early as October.
• Typhoon Chanthu ripped through the northernmost Philippines as a Category 5 storm over the weekend, the storm now heads for mainland China and Shanghai.
  
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is calling on the US to help remain independent of Russia and to get President Biden's backing to join NATO.
• California lawmakers have passed a bill aimed at protecting Amazon's warehouse workers in the state from "logistically impossible" quotas.
  

Last Call For Finally Joining The Fray

President Biden is finally realizing that without the end of the filibuster, that his entire legacy is in danger, and we will never have free and fair elections in GOP states. He's finally realized that he's the last card in the deck to be played to convince Manchin and Sinema to go along, or it's all over.

With a make-or-break vote looming in the Senate on a sweeping voting-rights and anti-corruption bill, President Joe Biden and his advisers have said in recent weeks that Biden will pressure wavering Democrats to support reforming the filibuster if necessary to pass the voting bill.

According to three people briefed on the White House’s position and its recent communications with outside groups, Biden assured Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that he was ready to push for filibuster reform. Biden’s pressure would aim to help Schumer convince moderate Democrats to support a carveout to the filibuster, a must for the party if it’s going to pass new voting protections without Republican votes. According to a source briefed on the White House’s position, Biden told Schumer: “Chuck, you tell me when you need me to start making phone calls.”

The Senate returns to work this upcoming week, and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer intends to call a vote on the For the People Act, the most ambitious reform bill in decades and the Democrats’ best shot at countering the wave of state-level GOP voter suppression laws this year. But to get the bill out of Congress, Senate Democrats will almost certainly need to change the filibuster, the procedural tactic used by the minority party to block many types of legislation.

Publicly, there are two centrist Democrats who have stated their opposition to changing or abolishing the filibuster, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Activist groups and fellow Democratic senators say Manchin and Sinema are the likely 49th and 50th votes both on any voting-rights legislation and especially any filibuster reforms. Sources say both senators are likely targets for when Biden launches his final push to pass a compromise version of the For the People Act.

“I think there’s a clear recognition the president will have a role to play in bringing this over the finish line, and if in order to do that, we need [filibuster] rules reform, then so be it,” says Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), who helped write the original version of the For the People Act. “I think Joe Biden with his long history and experience in the Senate can see that.”

A White House spokesman declined to comment on any private conversations between Biden and congressional leaders. The official said that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been “deeply involved” with the push to pass new voting protections. “The president and vice president have been very clear that this is a crucial priority and senior White House staff across many departments are constantly working on it,” the official said.

Even with a lobbying blitz from Biden, the path to passing the For the People Act is a tricky one. A group of senators will soon release a compromise version of the For the People Act intended to satisfy Manchin’s concerns about earlier versions of the bill. Sources familiar with the compromise bill say it will focus on shoring up voting rights against GOP suppression laws, crack down on dark money and partisan gerrymandering, and create new policies to stop attempts at election subversion like what happened after the 2020 presidential election.

But even if the revised bill earns the support of all Democrats, it won’t be enough to overcome the filibuster. Schumer will not only need to prevent a single defection on the bill itself but also convince — with Biden’s help — all 50 Democrats to create a carveout in the filibuster for voting-rights-related legislation.

 

Carveout rules already exist for nominations and budget reconciliation thanks to the GOP, but of course this will be sold as the end of the Republic, and most likely it will fail.

We'll see if this moves Manchin and Sinema at all. My fear is that it won't and the entire $3.5 trillion Good Package will fall along with it, and doom the Democrats and our country for decades.

As E.J. Dionne notes, failing to enact these measures in the weeks ahead could very well doom the American experiment.

Yes, the stakes are that high. The horror of what so many Republican-dominated state governments have done — most recently in Texas — to restrict access to the ballot and undercut the honest and nonpartisan counting of ballots presents Democrats with only two options: Act uncompromisingly at the national level to ensure democracy everywhere, or accept that many states in our union will, in important ways, cease to be democratic.

Killing a strong voting rights bill means accepting, to evoke Abraham Lincoln’s declaration on slavery, a nation half-democratic and half undemocratic.

Here again, the clarity of the hazard is pushing even reluctant Democrats to action. Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have said repeatedly that they would not overturn current filibuster rules to enact a voting rights bill.

So Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) issued Manchin a friendly challenge: Offer a proposal that you could vote for and find 10 Republicans to support it.

Manchin accepted the challenge, and as soon as this week, a group of Democrats including Manchin and Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Raphael G. Warnock (Ga.) could introduce a bill rooted in his ideas.

If Manchin can find 10 Republicans to support it, he will deserve canonization for having performed a miracle. If he can’t, will he and Sinema stick with their refusal to alter the filibuster and thus make themselves complicit in the death of a bill as important to democracy in our times as the original Voting Rights Act was in 1965?

Call me naive, but I do not believe that Manchin, Sinema and Biden want to be associated in history with those who failed to stand up for democracy at the hour of maximum danger. In a little over a month, we’ll know where they stand.

 

Unfortunately, I believe the opposite. I believe that by 2024 my vote will not only be meaningless, but punishable.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Local Edition

As the rest of the country was observing the 20th anniversary of 9/11, here in Northern Kentucky, right-wing radio host Eric Deters organized a Trump rally on his farm which attracted hundreds of delusional nutjobs screaming about how 2020 was stolen in a state that Trump won by 26 points.

On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, thousands of former President Donald Trump's supporters flocked to a farm a half-hour south of Cincinnati.

Among the pastures and bales of hay, banners directing expletives at President Joe Biden adorned trucks and fences.

This was a celebration organized by former lawyer Eric Deters, a conservative firebrand, podcaster and self-described "legal outlaw." He's no stranger to controversy. A judge in 2020 banned him from the Hamilton County courthouse for comments Deters made on his podcast, "The Bulldog."

Deters didn't see anything wrong with organizing a Trump pep rally on 9/11. It was the first Freedom Fest, something he told the crowd he wants to hold annually on his 138-acre farm in the rural outpost of Morning View, Ky., just south of Independence.

Speaking Saturday night were former Trump advisor and Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is currently dating Donald Trump Jr., and Fox News personality Tomi Lahren.

People came from all over the region, as far away as Batavia and Fairfield, united in their fealty to Trump, distrust of the COVID-19 vaccines and belief in the debunked myths surrounding the 2020 election and Trump's discredited claims of a stolen election. No evidence exists of widespread voter fraud.

"We're the outcasts of the country these days," said Bill Albright.

The 57-year-old traveled from his home in Batavia with his girlfriend Kathi Brinegar. They gripped flag poles on the hillside where Deters had built a stage and amphitheater, the wind whipping their large flags that said "2020 was rigged", "Unmasked, unmuzzled, unvaccinated, unafraid," and "Joe Biden sucks."

In the crowd were several members of the Proud Boys, wearing their yellow and black colors and polo shirts. The Proud Boys group is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Both the SPLC and Anti-Defamation League describe the Proud Boys' all-male membership as known for anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric.

During the speeches, one man in the Proud Boy colors flashed the 'OK' symbol, which the Anti-Defamation League and other civil rights groups say has been co-opted into a white supremacist symbol.

Hundreds of motorcycles thundered over the rolling hillsides and parked in front of the stage, forming a barricade between the stage and audience.

One of the bikers, Dwayne Turner, 51, of Goshen, told The Enquirer he was on the Capitol steps in Washington, D.C. during the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6. He said he didn't enter the Capitol, though.

He traveled to D.C. that day for Boots on the Ground Bikers for Trump organization to provide security for different groups.

"I was right on the steps," Turner said. "They made it out more than what it really was. The mainstream media has made it out to be an insurrection, to me it was a few people who were pissed off."

But many of the people who were at Freedom Fest said they weren't part of any group. About 100 cars and motorcycles, most decked out in pro-Trump, anti-vaccine regalia traveled up Ky. 17 for about 10 miles to Deters farm in a caravan.

Shari Reynolds, dressed head-to-toe in stars and stripes, walked among the cars pulled over at Pioneer Park in southern Covington. She was getting the caravan to Deters' farm into order, telling cars to put their blinkers on.

She said the caravan just kind of came together.

"It takes one person to organize somebody and you tell one person, and then you tell one person," Reynolds said. "The worst thing you can do is be silent."

Reynolds, 51, and her husband Patrick, 38, of Deer Park, like many of the thousands at Freedom Fest believe Trump won the 2020 election and distrust the media.

So then where do they get their information?

"I don't have any news sources," Patrick Reynolds said.

"Just research," Shari Reynolds said.

They do see news stories, Patrick Reynolds said, but "you have to research the information."

The keynote speakers, Lahren and Guilfoyle, in their speeches hit on the usual talking points, railing against vaccine mandates, praising Trump, slamming Biden and blaming "cancel culture" for silencing conservatives.

The media wasn't popular at Freedom Fest.

"The media has become so consumed by their own agenda that they've lost sight of their responsibility to report, to inform and to serve, but they sure do love their little fact checks," Guilfoyle said. "I could say Kentucky is a beautiful state, magnificent, and they would fact check me."

 

So you've got all the enduring, classic hits: Trump really won, we're the outcasts here even though Trump got 62% of the vote, the media is lying to us, along with white supremacist assholes like the Proud Boys in the crowd.

 

Believe me when I say that this is a nationwide cult now, and deprogramming them will take decades. It took decades to program them, you see.

Even right here in Northern Kentucky.

This is why I'm taking the calls to violence by Republican governors over Biden's mask mandate seriously. That's why I'm treating the potential threat of violence at the "Justice For J6" rally next weekend seriously.

These people are cultists. And cultists can do dangerous, deadly things.

Sunday Long Read: Hit And Run...For Office

Vanity Fair's Tom Kludt gives us our Sunday Long Read this week as the trial of South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg begins for the death of Joseph Paul Boever. Ravnsborg hit and killed Boever with his car on a dark night along a country highway last year with such force that Boever's head went through the windshield and his glasses were found in the vehicle. But Ravnsborg refuses to step down despite the growing calls for his resignation, and through it all a family grieves.

The diamond-shaped signs are hallmarks of the South Dakota highway, doubling as memorials and warnings. For more than 40 years, the state has placed them at the sites of motorized fatalities, making them disquieting roadside counterparts to the billboards summoning travelers to Wall Drug and other tourist enclaves. There is a bright red X near the uppermost tip and a pair of all-caps messages that force drivers to reckon with their own mortality: “THINK!” commands one side of the sign; “WHY DIE?” asks the other.

The “THINK signs,” as they are known locally, are installed by county highway departments, typically within days of the crash. It isn’t clear how many dot the flat terrain. The South Dakota Department of Transportation says it doesn’t keep records of where the signs are located or for whom they were erected, but that often isn’t required for anyone who has ever lived here. Everyone has a THINK sign story, and everyone knows the story behind the one situated on Highway 14 just outside of Highmore, South Dakota. Adorned with flowers and a wooden cross at its base, the sign there stands in memory of Joseph Paul Boever.

On September 12, 2020, Boever’s truck went into the ditch at around 7:30 p.m. and smashed into a bale of hay. He summoned his cousin Victor Nemec to the scene, and after surveying the damage incurred by the pickup’s front bumper, the two decided to retrieve it in the morning. Nemec recalled dropping off Boever, 55, at his home in Highmore and hearing him say he was going to bed. But shortly before 10:30 p.m., Boever was back in the area, armed with a flashlight and walking along the north shoulder of the road. Family members don’t know exactly why he was there.

South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg was heading toward Pierre that night, capping off what had been a demanding week of travel. Earlier in the evening, Ravnsborg (pronounced “ROUNDS-berg”) was in the town of Redfield to speak at a Lincoln Day dinner. It was the second Republican event Ravnsborg attended in as many days, having appeared at a Lincoln Day dinner in Rapid City held on September 11. Ravnsborg’s two-hour journey from Redfield to Pierre started out routine enough. He called his father, a nightly ritual ever since his mother passed away three years earlier. The call dropped, a common occurrence in a state blanketed by dead zones. And he listened to a broadcast of the Minnesota Twins game, a classic soundtrack for laconic summer drives through the upper Midwest.

As he passed through Highmore, Ravnsborg considered stopping for gas before opting to press on for the final 46 miles to Pierre. It was around there, he said later, that he turned the radio off after hearing the Twins collect the final out in their win over division rival Cleveland several minutes earlier. At 10:20, according to cell phone data obtained by the investigators, he unlocked his phone and signed into his Yahoo email account. From there, Ravnsborg scanned headlines before landing on an article published by a right-wing website about “Riding the Dragon,” a documentary billed as an exposé into the “secret world of Joe Biden and his family’s relationship to China and the sinister business deals that enriched them at America’s expense.” At 10:22, prosecutors determined he locked his phone. A minute later, Ravnsborg veered into the right shoulder, where Boever was walking, sending his head through the windshield.

What happened in the moments before the crash and in the subsequent 12 hours has consumed South Dakota’s political class, and even caused a rift between two Donald Trump allies. Governor Kristi Noem, a Republican star and potential 2024 contender, urged Ravnsborg, a self-described “pro-life, pro-2nd Amendment, pro-business” conservative, to resign. And yet Ravnsborg continues exerting his power in deep red South Dakota and beyond, from joining a 17-state legal effort in December to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat to teaming up last month with Republican attorneys general hoping to declare a New York state concealed carry gun law unconstitutional. Meanwhile, his predecessor has announced plans to run for attorney general again next year, despite Ravnsborg still being eligible to seek another term.

The case has stirred up questions about how investigations are handled in South Dakota, where virtually everyone is linked by fewer than six degrees of separation. Ravnsborg’s freedom may not be on the line, as prosecutors opted for less severe misdemeanor charges rather than, say, manslaughter. He is expected to plead no contest to two of the three charges, according to a source familiar with the matter, which could allow him to avoid a two-day trial that is scheduled to kick off Thursday. But although he has dodged the most dire of legal consequences, Ravnsborg’s future as a public figure may forever be clouded by a tragedy that has confounded residents, rocked the political establishment, and left a grieving family divided in its pursuit of clarity and justice.

 

A man is dead, killed by a power GOP politician, and we all know that the politician is not only going to get away with it, but most likely win a second term as the most powerful officer of the court in the state. A man whose job is enforcing the laws and keeping the order of the state is himself going to skate on taking another man's life and suffer no consequences whatsoever.

 

It comes at the expense of the people who put them in power.  Always.

 

This is the one-party corruption that Republicans seem to think Democrats have, but don't. Democrats get rid of their monsters, like Cuomo.

 

Republicans re-elect them.

 

That's the difference.

No Room At The ICU

Understand there are far more stories out there like this, where an Alabama man died from a heart attack after he was turned away from dozens of hospitals with no ICU beds to save him. We're only now hearing about them. There will be many, many more.

 

The family of a man who died of heart issues in Mississippi is asking people to get vaccinated for COVID-19 after 43 hospitals across three states were unable to accept him because of full cardiac ICUs.

Ray Martin DeMonia died last week in Meridian, Mississippi. He was three days shy of his 74th birthday and a well-known native in Cullman, Alabama, his family said.

DeMonia suffered from a cardiac event, and emergency staff at Cullman Regional Medical Center had to bring him to the nearest available bed, which was nearly 200 miles away at a Mississippi hospital.

In his obituary, DeMonia’s family urged people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

“In honor of Ray, please get vaccinated if you have not, in an effort to free up resources for non-COVID related emergencies,” the obituary read. “He would not want any other family to go through what his did.”

“Ray DeMonia was like no other,” his obituary read.

 

This wasn't a man who died of COVID. He died of cardiac arrest because there were no cardiac ICU beds available, because they were full of morons who yelled MUH FREEDOMS and refused to wear masks and refused to get vaccinated.

Expect a lot more triage death scenarios in the weeks ahead, especially in red states where the health care system is overloaded and has collapsed due to COVID delta cases.

We're already back to seeing three or four thousand dead per day and that's only going to get worse as COVID burns through the states this fall and winter. But unlike last year, we have a President who is telling people to be safe, mask up, and get the vaccine.  Tens of millions refuse.

So some of them will die drowning in their own liquefied lung tissue.

And a broken health care system will let thousands more die because there are no resources available to care for patients. None.

Never forget, this is what the GOP wants.

Some Twenty Years Gone

We've been told for two decades to Never Forget, but it seems we haven't learned a damn thing from 20 years ago, either.

When President Biden told an exhausted nation on Aug. 31 that the last C-17 cargo plane had left Taliban-controlled Kabul, ending two decades of American military misadventure in Afghanistan, he defended the frantic, bloodstained exit with a simple statement: “I was not going to extend this forever war.”

And yet the war grinds on.

As Mr. Biden drew the curtain on Afghanistan, the C.I.A. was quietly expanding a secret base deep in the Sahara, from which it runs drone flights to monitor Al Qaeda and Islamic State militants in Libya, as well as extremists in Niger, Chad and Mali. The military’s Africa Command resumed drone strikes against the Shabab, a Qaeda-linked group in Somalia. The Pentagon is weighing whether to send dozens of Special Forces trainers back into Somalia to help local troops fight the militants.

Even in Kabul itself, a fiery drone strike on men believed to be Islamic State plotters targeting the airport portended a future of military operations there. The attack, which the Pentagon called a “righteous strike” to avert another deadly suicide bombing, showcased America’s “over the horizon” abilities, to use a phrase favored by Mr. Biden. Family members denied that the men being targeted were militants and said the strike killed 10 people, seven of them children.

Twenty years after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the so-called war on terror shows no sign of winding down. It waxes and wanes, largely in the shadows and out of the headlines — less an epochal clash than a low-grade condition, one that flares up occasionally, as in 2017, when Islamic State militants ambushed American and local soldiers outside a village in Niger, killing four Americans.

Taking stock of this war is difficult because it is inseparable from the twin calamities of Afghanistan and Iraq. In those countries, the United States reached beyond the tactics of counterterrorism for a more ambitious, ill-fated project to remake fractured, tribal societies into American-style democracies.

Those failures are etched in the shameful images of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq or of desperate Afghans falling from the belly of an American plane. They are documented in the deaths of more than 7,000 American service members, hundreds of thousands of civilians and trillions of squandered American dollars.

The counterterrorism war, much of it waged covertly, defies such metrics. More and more of it involves partners. Large parts of it occur in distant places like the Sahel or the Horn of Africa. American casualties, for the most part, are limited. And success is measured not by capturing a capital or destroying an enemy’s army, but by breaking up groups before they have a chance to strike the American homeland or overseas assets like embassies and military bases.

By that yardstick, say counterterrorism experts, the war on terror has been an undisputed success.

“If you had said on 9/12 that we’d have only 100 people killed by jihadi terrorism and only one foreign terrorist attack in the United States over the next 20 years, you’d have been laughed out of the room,” said Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism in the Obama administration.

 

Well, nobody's flown another plane into a skyscraper, but we have plenty of terrorism, and plenty of people dying weekly, if not daily, to it.

Police in West Texas this week arrested Joseph Angel Alvarez, 38, who allegedly targeted a couple - killing the wife in the process - because they voted for Biden, and had a Biden flag and “a doll of Trump hanging” outside their home.

Alvarez, arrested September 8 nearly a year after the murder, is being held at the El Paso County Detention Center. He was jailed on a $2 million bond for the murder of Georgette Kaufmann, 50, and on a $500,000 bond for the aggravated assault of the woman’s husband, Daniel Kaufmann.

The couple was targeted on November 14, 2020, shortly after the U.S. presidential election, at their home in the 3000 block of Copper Avenue in Central El Paso.

 

The lesson we exported to the world was "deadly political violence works."

Last Call For Black And White

Marriage between Black and white people is...perfectly normal in 2021, despite all the screaming racism that still accompanies being a mixed-race kid, and I know several couples in fact. The latest Gallup poll finds 94% of Americans are okay with it, about as close to universal approval as anything race-related in this country will ever possibly get.

Ninety-four percent of U.S. adults now approve of marriages between Black people and White people, up from 87% in the prior reading from 2013. The current figure marks a new high in Gallup's trend, which spans more than six decades. Just 4% approved when Gallup first asked the question in 1958.

The latest figure is from a Gallup poll conducted July 6-21. Shifts in the 63-year-old trend represent one of the largest transformations in public opinion in Gallup's history -- beginning at a time when interracial marriage was nearly universally opposed and continuing to its nearly universal approval today.

The U.S. Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage nationwide in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case. A year after that decision, Gallup found support for the practice increasing, but still only a small minority of 20% approved.

Approval of interracial marriage continued to grow in the U.S. in periodic readings Gallup took over the following decades, finally reaching majority level in 1997, when support jumped from 48% to 64%. Support has increased in subsequent measures, surpassing 70% in 2003, 80% in 2011 and 90% in the current reading.

Non-White Americans have been consistently more approving of interracial marriages than White Americans -- but that gap has narrowed over time and, in the latest reading, has nearly closed.

Previous measures from 1968 to 2013 found double-digit gaps in approval between White and Non-White adults. Today, the three percentage points that separate approval among White (93%) and Non-White adults (96%) is within the poll's margin of error.

Recent growth at the national level has been driven by increasing approval among White Americans, as approval among Non-White Americans has been unchanged over the past decade.

Majorities of non-White adults since 1968 have approved of interracial marriage. It was not until 1997 that a majority of White adults held that opinion.

 

The reason it's now broadly acceptable, much like same-sex marriage, is that we all know people who are an interracial couple and have great kids and are good people and they are very much a part of our friends and families and this has become true all over the country.

So yeah, 94%? I'm actually kind of shocked it's that high, but there you are.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Attorney General Merrick Garland is suing Texas over its ridiculous abortion law that looks to get around Roe v. Wade by deputizing citizens to flood abortion providers and women with civil lawsuits, and despite the Supreme Court pretending to be too shocked to actually block the law last week, the Justice Department isn't letting this one go unchallenged.

The Justice Department has filed suit against the state of Texas to block its law banning most abortions, Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Thursday, setting up a high-stakes legal battle after the Supreme Court allowed the law to go into effect earlier this month.

"That act is clearly unconstitutional under long-standing Supreme Court precedent," Garland said at a news conference. "Those precedents hold, in the words of Planned Parenthood versus Casey, that 'regardless of whether exceptions are made for particular circumstances, a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.'"

He accused Texas Republicans of crafting a "statutory scheme" through the law "to nullify the Constitution of the United States."

"It does not rely on the state's executive branch to enforce the law, as is the norm in Texas and everywhere else. Rather, the snatcher deputizes all private citizens without any showing a personal connection or injury to serve as bounty hunters authorized to recover at least $10,000 per claim from individuals who facilitate a woman's exercise of our constitutional rights," he said.

As part of its lawsuit, Garland said the DOJ is seeking an immediate court order preventing the enforcement of SB8 in Texas.

Garland also made clear that the Justice Department won't hesitate to take similar legal action against other states that might pursue a similar route to restrict abortions.

"The additional risk here is that other states will follow similar models," Garland said, and he denied that the decision to file the suit now was in any way based on political pressure from Democrats or the White House.

The lawsuit accuses Texas lawmakers of enacting the law "in open defiance of the Constitution."

"The United States has the authority and responsibility to ensure that Texas cannot evade its obligations under the Constitution and deprive individuals of their constitutional rights by adopting a statutory scheme designed specifically to evade traditional mechanisms of federal judicial review," the lawsuit says. "The federal government therefore brings this suit directly against the State of Texas to obtain a declaration that S.B. 8 is invalid, to enjoin its enforcement, and to protect the rights that Texas has violated."

 

We'll see how quickly the courts act upon this, but yes, this is going to get ugly fast would be my guess. After all, the Roberts Court has already signaled the end of Roe and the end of abortion for about half of American women. States will be able to legislate it out of existence, and I'm expecting for states like Florida and Texas to make crossing state lines to get an abortion illegal as well, although that goes directly to the Commerce Clause having a hole blasted in it too by the Roberts Court.

It won't be long, either way.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

President Biden has finally stepped up with a major, national, federal vaccine mandate for American employers that will affect the vast majority of US workers: get vaccinated or else.

 

President Biden is announcing sweeping new vaccine mandates Thursday that will affect tens of millions of Americans, ordering all businesses with more than 100 employees to require their workers to be inoculated or face weekly testing.

Biden also will require all health facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding to vaccinate their workforces, which the White House believes will impact 50,000 locations.

And the president plans to sign an executive order that would require all federal employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus — without an option for those who prefer to be regularly tested instead — in an effort to create a model he hopes state governments and private companies will adopt.

The cluster of new policies comes as the country grapples with the highly contagious delta variant, which has sent cases surging to more than 150,000 a day and is causing more than 1,500 daily deaths. The White House has struggled to convince hesitant Americans to get vaccinated and has been increasingly shifting toward requirements.

The changes also come as Biden’s approval rating has fallen in recent weeks, with Americans less supportive of his handling of the pandemic. Defeating the pandemic was among his central promises, and White House aides believe that his ability to deliver on it will be critical to the success of his presidency.

The White House released an 11-page memo Thursday entitled “Path Out of the Pandemic” that outlined six key areas where Biden is either shifting or hardening his strategy on the virus.

The most far-reaching is a new regulation to be written by the Labor Department that will requires all businesses with more than 100 employees either to mandate vaccinations for all their workers, or require them to take weekly coronavirus tests. The White House estimates that the policy will impact about 80 million workers, or two-thirds of the country’s workforce.

Businesses that ignore the policy, once it’s in place, could trigger penalties of up to $14,000 per violation, according to a senior Biden administration official, who briefed reporters on the plan ahead of the president’s speech under the condition that his name would not be used.

Businesses also will be required to give workers paid time off to get vaccinated, according to the new rules.

“This plan will ensure that we are using every available tool to combat COVID-19 and save even more lives in the months ahead, while also keeping schools open and safe, and protecting our economy from lockdowns and damage,” according to a copy of the memo.

 

It's a great plan.

 

It will be blocked by a federal judge before it ever goes into effect, however.

I guarantee that.

Best case scenario, businesses decide to err on the side of caution and mandate anyway, but they will run afoul of red state anti-mandate laws (which also may or may not be blocked).  The point it, the legal morass will not appreciably increase the number of vaccinated Americans by any significant amount.

This plan too will be made to fail by the GOP. And Biden will be blamed.

StupidiNews!

• Los Angeles County Schools will mandate the COVID-19 vaccine for all eligible students 12 and over by December 31, or students will not be able to attend school after winter break.
• Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio went into lockdown Thursday night after reports of an armed gunman and a shooting.
• President Biden spoke directly with Chinese President XI Jinping on Thursday, the two discussed economic and security concerns for about 90 minutes.
• Democrats are moving ahead with 12 weeks of paid parental leave in the House among other safety net provisions as part of the $3.5 trillion infrastructure package.
• The LAPD is getting social media information from those detained by police, the data is being fed into analysis systems powered by controversial data surveillance company Palantir.