The Vax Of Life, Con't

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Sunday Long Read: Fighting On The Southern Front

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes to us from Scientific American, where an ICU nurse, Kathryn Ivey, describes her experiences in the ICU as a rookie.

I saw my name followed by “RN” for the first time on July 27, 2020. The next day, my instructor, or preceptor, and I were assigned to the COVID intensive care unit at our hospital in Nashville, Tenn. I read the assignment sheet with a strange knot in my chest. It wasn’t fear or dread rising into my throat but something much harder to name.

For months, as a nurse intern, I’d watched the battle-weary nurses emerge from COVID rooms, taking off their PPE like warriors stripping off armor, their faces lined from the pressure of the respirators. There was something etched in their faces I couldn’t fully understand at the time, something that ran deeper than sadness, some terrible weight that came from caring for these patients. Now it was my turn for what became a grim initiation into the world of nursing and medicine. I learned how to be a nurse behind a respirator and a yellow gown amid the constant beeping and hissing of ventilators that couldn’t support failing lungs. I learned how to be a nurse with death constantly at my heels.

Because I was so new, I had no baseline for what normal nursing looked like; I just had a vague sense that it couldn’t look like this. The unit was bleak, and everything we did felt futile, and I realized at some point I felt more like a ferryman to death than anything else. Some people lived—if they never got to the point they needed continuous BiPAP, a type of face mask that constantly pushes air into the lungs. Most didn’t live. By the time they came to us, they were too sick and were beyond the power we had to heal. They were in renal failure, respiratory failure, liver failure, cardiac failure. One organ system would fall, and it brought down the next and then the next like dominos, a horrible cascade that we could predict but not stop.

I watched, feeling helpless, as patient after patient progressed through the stages of the disease, each requiring a higher level of oxygen support: nasal cannula to Vapotherm to BiPAP. Then, when their chests started heaving and they started sweating despite the BiPAP mask forcing the strongest possible concentration of oxygen into their lungs, I knew with heavy dread that soon they would be intubated. I remember every single time I made the call to the doctor to tell her that it was time. Then came the quiet acquiescence on the end of the line and the flurry of activity as we prepared the ventilator and the medications that would keep them comfortable after. I remember every single 2 A.M. phone call to family members so they could hear the voice of the person they loved at least one more time.

“Is she going to be okay?” they would ask. I tried not to lie, not to give false hope. I heard too many voices cracking on the other end of the line, the family beset with helplessness and with grief. “We’re going to do everything we can,” I would say.

There are places we can’t call you back from—places you go where we can’t follow. And this is one of them. The ICU felt like purgatory, like a punishment, like we were torturing these people whose bodies were wrecked beyond hope. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were failing them. The feeling of wrongness was so pervasive that it followed me home and would have choked me if I let it. So I didn’t let it. I got used to the death. I walled it off, pushed it down and did my job. I advocated for death with dignity, with as much kindness and comfort as we can muster, and I accepted very early on that we can't save everyone.

Every time I try to describe the COVID unit in anything more than metaphor and allusion, I falter. I can tell you that for a while, walking into work felt like Dante following Virgil past the gates and the warning inscribed there. I can talk about Charon and the river Styx and how the nurses flitted between worlds, crossing that river of death every time we entered a COVID room. What I’m saying is dramatic and probably pretentious, but language fails here. I don’t think there are words for what this is. The COVID unit is mottled limbs and scorching skin; bloody secretions and constant alarms from one patient after another going into abnormal heart rhythm;. It is the beeping of the Prismaflex delivering continuous renal replacement therapy because the circuit pulling the patient’s blood outside of their body to filter it, as the failing kidneys should do, has clotted yet again. The ventilators sound the alarm from inside the rooms for 1,000 reasons, some of them fixable, some not. Room after room of patients are on life support, silent except for the relentless chiming and beeping that remind us that they are dying, we are failing. Those alarms ring in my head when I get home, reminding me of every way I couldn’t save them. We are haunted by failures now, starting with the failures of policy that allowed human lives to be sacrificed on the altar of the economy and ending with us telling a family that we can do no more. COVID has made martyrs of us all.

 

Zandarmom is a retired nurse, and I just scream when I read accounts like this and think of the absolute, infantile selfishness of the anti-vaccine fools. I don't want to bring them into the fold, I want to wring their damn necks.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The anger and rage at the "Justice for J6" rally in DC was definitely there, the people that showed up hoping for another armed insurrection definitely wanted one, but the problem was there were only a handful of clowns there and a whole hell of a lot of Capitol Police.  The clowns had plenty to say, though.

 

Mike Collins is one of just two Congressional candidates announced as a speaker for the incredibly shrinking "Justice for J6 rally" at the U.S. Capitol tomorrow. And he's using the moment to go full wingnut.

Collins, a trucking company owner, ramped up wild rhetoric Friday at what was billed as a "campaign kickoff" in Jackson GA -- even though Collins had announced his candidacy more than three months ago on June 8.

Collins "promised to stand up to 'liberal left-wing wackos, RINOS, elites — and even the Republican establishment," including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), promising to vote against him becoming Speaker of the House if Republicans take control of the chamber in 2023,' Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) reported Friday.

"And if by some odd chance he becomes speaker and he doesn't want to give me a committee assignment, then I'm fine with that," he said. "I'll make a great teammate for Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene."

He added: "The time for civility, the time for compromise, that's over with; the time for bipartisanship is done," he told. "There is no compromising."

Collins is among just a few speakers being billed for the diminished rally. But he's undaunted about that.

"He said his attendance at the D.C. rally is about fighting back against political persecution and tweeted that "America should not have a government that holds political prisoners," GPB reported.

"These people deserve their day in court; everybody deserves their day in court," he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "And I'm going up there to say to these people need their day in court, and it's time for it to happen."

Collins is the son of the late Rep. Mac Collins, who served in Congress from 1993 to 2005, leaving to mount an unsuccessful 2004 U.S. Senate race. The elder Collins died in 2018.

 

Thankfully my worst fears did not come to pass. Nothing happened other than a couple dozen fools made themselves readily available for identification later.

Without Trump covering for them, these guys are much, much less aggressive. But with the media covering them, they don't always have to be aggressive. Just threatening.

Still dangerous. But I don't think another January 6th is going to happen anytime soon. That's good, believe me, I am glad to be completely wrong on this, and I admit it. All bullies are at heart, cowards.

But cowards can still be deadly once in a great while. We still need to be careful.

Not scared or afraid, but careful.

The French Correction

France is so unhappy with America's decision to sell Australia nuclear sub technology that for the first time in the history of the US and France, Paris has recalled its Ambassador to Washington for consultations, in what amounts to yet another major international incident on President Biden's plate.

The rift between the Biden administration and the oldest U.S. ally widened Friday, as French President Emmanuel Macron ordered the recall of France’s ambassador to Washington in response to this week’s announcement of a secretly negotiated U.S.-British deal to sell nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.

Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called the unprecedented move an “extraordinary decision” that “reflects the exceptional seriousness” of the situation.

What he called “a new partnership” excluding France, and the resulting cancellation of a $66 billion Australian contract to buy diesel-powered French submarines, “constitute unacceptable behavior among allies and partners,” Le Drian said in a statement.

France also recalled its ambassador to Australia.

In a statement, the White House played down the breach. “We have been in close touch with our French partners. . . . We understand their position and will continue to be engaged in the coming days to resolve our differences, as we have done at other points over the course of our long alliance,” National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne said in a statement.

“France is our oldest ally and one of our strongest partners, and we share a long history of shared democratic values and a commitment to working together to address global challenges,” Horne said.

 

France is pissed, and if you're wondering why, well, here you go.  

There are a number of reasons. For one, the deal was of virtually unrivaled economic significance to France’s defense sector, said Pierre Morcos, a French visiting fellow at the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The deal was crucial for “a whole network of small and medium enterprises” in France that were supposed to benefit from it, he said. The economic significance of the Australia deal has been compared to a landmark 2015 agreement between India and French company Dassault Aviation to supply 36 Rafale fighter jets.

Second, France stands to lose strategically as a result of Australia bowing out of its previous commitment. When the deal was struck, the French government celebrated a “strategic partnership … for the next 50 years.”

“This overall framework is now jeopardized,” Morcos said.

A third key reason for the French anger is the way the deal between Australia, Britain and the United States was announced. A French official said Thursday that Paris learned of the decision only through media reports — even though it had been negotiated among the three participants for months.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that France was “aware in advance” of the new agreement, although Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicated that awareness came only in the past day or two.

The fact that the Biden administration did not apparently anticipate the furious French reaction means that “we are heading toward difficult times between Paris, Canberra and Washington,” Morcos said.

France’s unusually blunt reaction to the deal suggests that it could have longer-term implications for President Biden’s pledge to reset transatlantic relations after four tumultuous years under President Donald Trump.

Within the European Union, the fallout could play into the hands of those calling for the bloc to boost its defense capabilities and to be less reliant on the United States. Such demands had already gained momentum over the past weeks amid the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen endorsed calls for a 5,000-person rapid-deployment force and announced two new measures: a forthcoming declaration from the E.U. and NATO, and a summit focused on European defense with French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been one of the most persistent proponents of “strategic autonomy” for the bloc. 

Of course, the big winner in all of this diplomatic mess is China, who is licking its chops and looking right across the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan is a "sea fortress" blocking China's expansion into the Pacific and is willing to share with other democracies its knowledge of countering Beijing's efforts to undermine it, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told a U.S. audience on Wednesday.

The United States, like most countries, does not have formal diplomatic ties with Chinese-claimed Taiwan, but is the democratically ruled island's most important international backer and arms supplier.

China has stepped up military and diplomatic pressure against Taiwan since President Tsai Ing-wen first won office in 2016, seeking to force Taipei to accept Beijing's sovereignty claims, to the alarm of both Taipei and Washington.

Addressing an online forum organised by the Global Taiwan Institute on Taiwan-U.S. relations and attended by several former senior U.S. officials, Wu said Taiwan played a "significant role" in ensuring freedom of navigation in the strategically important Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.

"Both of them are critical to peace and stability in the Indo Pacific region," he said. "Most importantly, a democratic Taiwan serves as a sea fortress to block China's expansionism into the wider Pacific."

China claims Taiwan as its territory to legitimise its aggression and expansionism, Wu said, adding: "Isn't this irredentism precisely what gave rise to the Second World War?"

Taiwan faces not only military threats from China, but also cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and other "grey zone" tactics, he added.

"Taiwan has learned valuable lessons and developed various means to tackle the threat to democracy, and we are more than willing to share this knowledge with fellow democracies."

There was no immediate response to his comments from China.

Earlier on Wednesday, China's Taiwan Affairs Office repeated warnings for Taipei's government not to try and seek formal independence for the island, saying such "wanton provocations and evil acts" would only threaten peace and stability.

 

France is throwing a fit, but the country's time of being a major naval power has been over for basically all of my life. The only folks who didn't know it were, well, Paris.

We'll see how Biden handles this. It seems like amazing Gallic pique, but okay then.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

What the anti-choice crowd wants is control over women, and more importantly control over their bodies, and control over their lives. They keep revealing their hand to the world, and every keeps going "Oh, no, that would never happen here" and voters continue to vote for the GOP ghouls anyway.

The legal architect of the Texas abortion ban has argued in a supreme court brief that overturning Roe v Wade, the landmark decision which guarantees a right to abortion in the US, could cause women to practice abstinence from sexual intercourse as a way to “control their reproductive lives”.

Former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, who played a pivotal role in designing the legal framework of the state’s near-total abortion ban, also argued on behalf of anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life that women would still be able to terminate pregnancies if Roe was overturned by traveling to “wealthy pro-abortion” states like California and New York with the help of “taxpayer subsidies”.

“Women can ‘control their reproductive lives’ without access to abortion; they can do so by refraining from sexual intercourse,” Mitchell wrote in the brief. “One can imagine a scenario in which a woman has chosen to engage in unprotected (or insufficiently protected) sexual intercourse on the assumption that an abortion will be available to her later. But when this court announces the overruling of Roe, that individual can simply change their behavior in response to the court’s decision if she no longer wants to take the risk of an unwanted pregnancy.”

The supreme court is due to hear a Mississippi case this term that experts say could lead to the reversal of the Roe decision by the court’s conservative majority. The argument was made in an amicus, or “friend of the court”, brief in which outside parties can present arguments on cases before the court. The brief was filed on 29 July, about four weeks before Texas’s abortion ban went into effect.

In the same brief, which calls for Roe to be overturned, Mitchell and co-counsel Adam Mortara, an anti-abortion activist and lawyer who clerked for the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, said such a decision could open the door for other “lawless” rights and protections to be reversed, including the right to have gay sex and the right to same-sex marriage.

The lawyers argued that while it was not necessary for the high court to immediately overrule the legal cases that enshrine those rights, “neither should the court hesitate to write an opinion that leaves those decisions hanging by a thread”.

Those cases (Lawrence, which outlawed criminal sanctions against people who engaged in gay sex, and Obergefell, which legalized same-sex marriage) were “far less hazardous to human life”, they said, but just “as lawless as Roe”.

It is common for high-profile cases such as the Mississippi abortion case to elicit amicus briefs by activists and lawyers who are seeking to weigh in on the legal debate.

But Mitchell and Mortara’s brief is significant because conservatives on the high court recently ruled in a controversial 5-4 decision to allow a Texas law to stand that was designed by Mitchell and in effect bans abortions after about six weeks, before most people know they are pregnant.

While the majority of the justices stressed that they had not yet ruled on the constitutionality of the Texas law itself, the ruling showed that the majority was receptive to Mitchell’s legal strategy.

 

Here's the thing, it's not going to stop at abortion, it's going to lead to the outlawing of birth control and a lot more. If they get the win on Roe, they can reverse same-sex marriage and even criminalize sex itself between two people of the same sex (again).

It's not going to end at "Well, states should be able to make their own decisions on the legality of abortion" either. Your rights will vary wildly by where you live in the years ahead, just replace "legality of abortion" with "legality" of a host of other things.

When I say what they want is the tend of the civil rights era, this is what I mean. Your rights will be determined by what state you live in, not the fact that you're living in America, the country.

Then we stop being a country, but warring states.

Again.

Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

Three North Carolina state judges have ruled 2-1 that the state's Voter ID law is still "motivated at least in part by an unconstitutional intent" to target Black voters as the legal battles continue over the NC GOP's ongoing Black voter suppression efforts.

North Carolina judges struck down the state’s latest photo voter identification law on Friday, agreeing with minority voters that Republicans rammed through rules tainted by racial bias as a way to remain in power.

Two of the three trial judges declared the December 2018 law is unconstitutional, even though it was designed to implement a photo voter ID mandate added to the North Carolina Constitution in a referendum just weeks earlier. They said the law intentionally discriminates against Black voters, violating their equal protections.

The law “was motivated at least in part by an unconstitutional intent to target African American voters,” Superior Court Judges Michael O’Foghludha and Vince Rozier wrote in their 100-page majority opinion.

“Other, less restrictive voter ID laws would have sufficed to achieve the legitimate nonracial purposes of implementing the constitutional amendment requiring voter ID, deterring fraud, or enhancing voter confidence.”

The majority decision, which followed a three-week trial in April, is now likely headed to a state appeals court, which had previously blocked the law’s enforcement last year while the case was heard. The law remains unenforceable with this ruling.

With a similar lawsuit in federal court set to go to trial this January and another state court lawsuit now on appeal, it’s looking more unlikely that a voter ID mandate for in-person and absentee balloting will happen in the 2022 elections.

The ruling reflects “how the state’s Republican-controlled legislature undeniably implemented this legislation to maintain its power by targeting voters of color,” said Allison Riggs, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney.

Spokespersons for Republican legislative leaders, House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger, didn’t immediately respond to email requests for comment.

 

Southern states increasingly aren't "red" states, they are "states where Black and brown voters are kept from voting "states. Losing Virginia to the Democrats was bad enough, but if Republicans lost Georgia, NC, Florida and Texas, their national ambitions would be done.

They know this.

Everything going forward is the GOP maintaining their power through white supremacist tricks as old as America itself.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

The violence by anti-vax cultists continues against the rest of America, and it will continue for some time, unfortunately.

Three people were arrested for allegedly assaulting a New York City restaurant hostess on Thursday after she asked a group of diners visiting from Texas to show proof they had been vaccinated before seating them.

Cellphone footage obtained by NBC New York shows a brawl involving several people outside Carmine's Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side. Staff and bystanders intervened to break up the melee after it broke out around 5 p.m. ET, the station added.

The hostess, who has not been identified, was repeatedly punched and her necklace broken, police said.

One unspecified patient was taken to the Mount Sinai Hospital, the New York City Fire Department said, without stating their condition.

The three suspects, whose ages are 21, 44 and 49, were taken to NYPD's nearby 24th precinct station house, police said.

The attack comes as New York City this week became to first major U.S. city to require hospitality, entertainment and fitness businesses to ask customers for proof of vaccination to gain access to indoor venues. Any business that fails to comply could face a $1,000 fine.

Carmine's said in a statement to NBC New York that it was "shocking and tragic situation when one of our valued employees is assaulted for doing their job — as required by city policies — and trying to make a living."

Gale Brewer, the Manhattan borough president, said on Twitter the incident was "completely unacceptable."

In a separate tweet she added: "There’s no place for this kind of violence to be perpetrated against our essential workers."

 

I know the right is going to scream "Discrimination!" and make idiotic and repulsive yellow star of David comparisons blaming Mayor de Blasio as a "bigot" but nothing excuses the assault of a restaurant employee or anyone over this.

I honestly expect people to be killed over this, and soon. The next time there's violence against a restaurant worker or another person enforcing mandates like this I'm afraid it will lead to someone getting badly hurt or killed, especially if that worker is Black or brown. 

It's only a matter of time.

The Big Lie, Con't

If it even possible for a state to do a worse job than Arizona did with its bogus "independent election fraud audit investigation", the "results" being made public next week because even Arizona Republicans are actively tired of the scam, well, we're about to find out as Pennsylvania Republicans are electing to do that even worse job by subpoenaing voter information on millions of voters, effectively ridding the state of secret ballots.

 

Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania on Wednesday approved subpoenas for a wide range of data and personal information on voters, advancing a probe of the 2020 election in a key battleground state former president Donald Trump has repeatedly targeted with baseless claims of fraud.

The move drew a sharp rebuke from Democrats who described the effort as insecure and unwarranted and said they would consider mounting a court fight. Among other requests, Republicans are seeking the names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, last four digits of Social Security numbers, addresses and methods of voting for millions of people who cast ballots in the May primary and the November general election.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) called Wednesday’s vote “merely another step to undermine democracy, confidence in our elections and to capitulate to Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.”

Wolf added in a statement, “Election security is not a game and should not be treated with such carelessness. Senate Republican[s] should be ashamed of their latest attempt to destabilize our election system through a sham investigation that will unnecessarily cost taxpayers millions of dollars.”

But Sen. Cris Dush, the Republican chairman of the committee that approved the subpoena, argued during the hearing that the information is needed because “there have been questions regarding the validity of people who have voted — whether or not they exist.”

“Again, we are not responding to proven allegations. We are investigating the allegations to determine whether or not they are factual,” he said, adding that the vetting process for outside vendors will be “rigorous.”

Judges, including on the Pennsylvania and U.S. Supreme Courts, have denied bids by Trump and his allies to overturn President Biden’s win in the state or invalidate millions of ballots.

Yet in Pennsylvania and other battleground states, Republican legislators have bowed to pressure from Trump and his base to investigate the results, despite a consensus among judges, election officials and experts that there was no widespread fraud in the election.

 

An outside vendor is going to have full identifying information on as many as seven million Pennsylvania voters, and exactly how they voted, including name, SSN, and all registration info. The potential for abuse or for criminal action here through a security breach is catastrophically high.

This has to be stopped by Dems and the courts.

Hopefully they will be able to.

StupidiNews!

• France has canceled a Washington DC reception in protest of America's deal with Australia to buy US nuclear submarines rather than French technology.
• Justice Department Special Prosecutor John Durham has indicted Democratic party lawyer Michael Sussman in connection with Durham's investigation into the FBI's Trump probe.
• A US federal judge has granted an order for an alleged sexual assault victim of Britain's Prince Andrew to serve a court summons to the royal second son.
• The House January 6th Committee wants Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley to testify about his actions on that day involving Donald Trump and the Capitol insurrection.
• A new study confirms a 2006 theory that the reason a Stradivarius violin has such a unique sound is due to the chemicals in the instruments' varnish.

That's The Sound Of The Police, Con't

Tampa cops are evicting mass numbers of Black and brown folk from public housing because somebody in the household committed a midemeanor. They report the "offenders" to the Tampa Housing Authority who evicts them because of CRIME. And of course, this happens even after people are cleared by the courts and the charges dropped, and they still lose their homes.

The summation of law enforcement officers are comprised of corrupt blackguards.

Police apprehended the three teenage boys, their pockets bulging with coins, close to South Seminole Heights shortly before dawn.

The youngest was 16. His haul from a nighttime spree of stealing from cars was $4.44 in change, a glove, a flashlight, a hoodie and wireless headphones.

The boy was taken to a juvenile detention center. Make sure he goes to school and does not sneak out at night, police told his mother.

But under a Tampa police initiative, officers also notified the management of Robles Park Village, the public housing complex where he lived.

His entire family lost their home.

Since 2013, the Tampa Police Department has taken a hands-on role at more than 100 apartment communities, sending notices to landlords when their tenants are arrested or stopped by officers and encouraging their eviction.

The program, known as Crime-Free Multi Housing, was marketed to landlords as a way to keep violent crime and drug and gang activity off their properties.

Police pledged to create a database of “documented violent offenders, gang members or career criminals involved in your community.” It alerted landlords to tenants arrested for armed robbery and drug dealing.

But the program also swept up more than 100 people who were arrested for misdemeanors — and dozens more whose charges were later dropped, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

Tenants were reported to their landlord for matters as small as shoplifting; two were reported for driving with a suspended license. Entire families lost their homes after the arrest of a child or a relative who didn’t live with them.

And roughly 90 percent of the 1,100 people flagged by the program were Black, police records show. That’s despite Black residents making up only 54 percent of all arrests in Tampa over the past eight years.

The Times first approached the Tampa police about the program in 2017. Since then, the department has operated the program less aggressively, sending fewer letters to landlords and toning down wording that instructed landlords to take action. But police are continuing to report tenants to their landlords.

Mayor Jane Castor, who launched the initiative when she was police chief, remains bullish about the program. She said it has significantly reduced crime rates in tough-to-police neighborhoods, improving the quality of life for lawful tenants. That includes a 39 percent drop in serious crime reports at Robles Park, police said.

“In some of the lower-income complexes, they were just like the O.K. Corral,” Castor said. “People were hostages in their apartments and couldn’t let their kids out to play.”

Police officials said they had no say in whether a tenant was evicted — they were just sharing information.

“I don’t think that the landlords are evicting somebody based on a notice of arrest,” Castor said.

The police department’s biggest landlord partner was the Tampa Housing Authority, which provides housing to some of the city’s lowest income families. It received roughly one-quarter of the notices.

Bill Jackson, the authority’s director of public safety, said that his agency supports the program — and that he wasn’t concerned that people were evicted even when the State Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute.

That happens sometimes because those who are arrested turn informant, he said, adding that judges issue an eviction only if they are satisfied there are grounds. The authority conducts its own investigation, too, he said.

“We don’t need a conviction,” Jackson said. “We just need reasonable suspicion.”

National experts, however, said the city’s program violates federal housing law and noted that the ACLU is suing similar programs in other cities.

“This is an example of expansive police power going under the radar,” saidDeborah Archer, a professor at New York University School of Law and faculty director of the school’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law. “We shouldn’t be attaching these kinds of consequences to arrests.”

This infuriates me. You get kicked out of your home for a misdemeanor, or even being charged with one? Jesus hell, the Justice Department and HUD need to come down on Tampa like an asteroid and clear the entire place out.

Screw these assholes.

The Default Fault Halt

Senate Republicans are licking their chops at the prospect of cratering the US economy to score points by blocking a rise in the debt limit, and forcing the US into a recession-creating default, and as Greg Sargent reminds us, it'll be 100% the GOP's fault if it happens.

The current position held by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and most Republican senators is that this fall they will vote in favor of the United States defaulting on its debts, leading to economic Armageddon.

You don’t hear their position described this way in many press accounts, to be sure. But that is functionally their position: They are threatening to withhold all GOP support when Congress votes to suspend the debt limit, probably sometime in October.

If the debt limit is not suspended or raised, the United States will default, with horrible consequences, and Republicans are threatening to vote no.

McConnell spelled out his position in new detail in an interview with Punchbowl News. He says Democrats must suspend or raise the debt limit as part of their multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation bill, where they can do so by simple majority, without any Republicans.

If they do not, McConnell says, no Republicans will support suspending it or raising it as part of some other process, say, via a “clean” debt limit bill, or as part of a continuing resolution funding the government at the end of September (which would require 60 votes to overcome a GOP filibuster).

This is being widely portrayed as creating a dilemma for Democrats. And that’s true, if only in the sense that epic Republican bad faith is creating a dilemma for the more responsible party.

Democrats joined with Republicans to suspend the debt limit under President Donald Trump, and a good deal of debt was racked up during that period. Given this, Democrats are insisting that Republicans must join them to suspend the debt limit this time — suspending it would effectively render it inoperative until a future date — and they are daring Republicans to vote no.

One way Democrats might do this — which is favored by the White House — is to bundle the debt limit suspension with a government funding bill that would also include huge amounts of disaster aid, much of it for red states. The thinking is this disaster money should make it harder for Republicans to vote against it.

But Politico reports that Republicans are still threatening to withhold their votes, even if that disaster money is in that package, and blasting the White House and Democrats for even considering this approach.

Remarkably, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) insists not only that this won’t pass but also the mere fact that Democrats might do this shows they’re operating “in bad faith” and don’t actually have the “back” of disaster-sufferers.

Just try to fathom how deranged that position truly is. Republicans insist Democrats must deal with the debt limit themselves, with no Republican support, and if Democrats package this with other things that must be done — such as disaster aid or funding the government — that’s somehow placing unfair pressure on Republicans to join in raising it.

But Republicans themselves agree the debt limit must be suspended or raised. Kennedy agrees with this. So does McConnell! As McConnell puts it, “America should never and never will default.”

So why shouldn’t they feel obliged to actually vote to suspend or raise the debt limit for the good of the country, just as Democrats did under a Republican president, when this also had to be done for the good of the country?

 

So while I expect the Dems to indeed raise the debt limit through budget reconciliation, or at least suspend it, Republicans figure they can tie that around the necks of Dems for good. Thing is though, people like it when the government actually doesn't shut down, and the GOP has had so many shutdown tantrums in the last 25 years that nobody's going to buy they're arguing in good faith.

Bring it, I say.

StupidiNews!

• Commercial spaceflight company SpaceX has successfully launched four space tourists into orbit, the flight financed by billionaire Jared Isaacman, for a three-day mission.
• Mecklenburg County, NC has suspended nearly 600 county employees without pay for failing to produce COVID-19 vaccination results.
• The US and Britain are partnering with Australia to give the island nation nuclear submarine technology in order to counter China's presence in the South Pacific.
• UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has rearranged his cabinet, including replacing Foreign Minister Dominic Raab with the first woman to hold the position, Liz Truss.
• US hospitals in COVID-19 crisis red states are collapsing, with fully a quarter of ICUs across the nation 95% full.
  

Last Call For Winning The Popularity Contest

Right-wingers are ripping their hair out over TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People for 2021. Sure, Trump and Tucker are on the list, but so are Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project as director Barry Jenkins explains.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is larger than life. She must be, for how else can one describe a journalist who catalyzes the debate over how a nation teaches its history?

This may be the sum effect of Nikole’s greatest work—The 1619 Project, an analysis of the legacy of slavery in the U.S.—but it is certainly not the sum of her. The journalist from Waterloo, Iowa, contains multitudes. She is the most emphatic laugh, the consummate ally, the staunchest critic. On Twitter, she is Ida Bae Wells, an allusion to her most direct antecedent, the trailblazing journalist Ida B. Wells. In 1892, Ms. Wells spoke across millennia of Ms. Hannah-Jones when she said, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

The light Nikole wields is titanic, a blinding beam that illuminates and scorches. In her light, the wounds of America’s original and subsequent sins are laid bare. With her light, the serrated flesh of this country’s past is both subject and predicate, a light wielded to both identify wounds and cauterize flesh.

In considering Nikole, my mind drifts to images of James Baldwin and Nina Simone smoking and smiling in an overly bright den. My mind goes here because like Nikole, Mr. Baldwin and Ms. Simone also wielded light and made plain a truth Nikole has lived—in shining her powerful and painful light in the preservation of Blackness, this wonderful woman is proof and testament to the unshakable spirit of Blackness.

 

In fact, there are an awful lot of Black folks on the list this year, Simone Biles, Meghan Markle, Naomi Osaka, Ben Crump, N.K. Jemisin, Sherrilyn Ifill, Shonda Rhimes, Tracee Ellis Roo, Lil Nas X, and more.

I'm glad to see things looking up.

General Override

Fox News and the right-wing noise machine want to do to Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley what should have actually been done to former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn: court-martial and prosecute him for treason.

When Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley goes before Congress on Sept. 28, he may face some of the most hostile questioning of any modern four-star general.

Driving the news: Newly released excerpts from "Peril" by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa — detailing secret moves by the nation's highest-ranking military officers to manage national security risks that he perceived Donald Trump posed in the final days of his presidency — are driving questions about whether Milley went too far.

The big picture: Republicans were already irate with Milley for playing a starring role in a string of recent Trump books. Even some of his friends are cringing over his extensive and high-profile scenes in these books and perceptions that he's participated on "deep background" with multiple authors. Extensive direct quotes attributed to Milley have led Republicans to accuse him of personally leaking to authors.

Details: The most explosive Woodward/Costa excerpts report on two phone calls the authors say happened between Milley and his Chinese counterpart — on Oct. 30 and Jan. 8. In the account, Milley reportedly assures the Chinese general that Trump would not attack China and that if Trump did decide to attack then Milley would give his Chinese counterpart a secret heads up. Milley has yet to respond to this latest reporting.

What they're saying: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, cited Woodward's and Costa's reporting in calling for President Biden to fire Milley, accusing him of working to "actively undermine the sitting Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces." 

"General Milley has attempted to rationalize his reckless behavior by arguing that what he perceived as the military's judgement as more stable than its civilian commander," Rubio said, calling that "a dangerous precedent" that "threatens to tear apart our nation's longstanding principle of civilian control of the military."

Behind the scenes: In mid-October 2020, top Pentagon officials grew concerned about intelligence they'd seen. It showed the Chinese were consuming their own intelligence that had made them concerned about the possibility of a surprise U.S. strike against China, three sources familiar with the situation tell Axios. 

One of the sources said: "I think they [the Chinese] were getting bad intelligence... a combination of 'wag the dog' conspiracy thinking and bad intel from bad sources."

 

Now frankly, Gen. Milley is a hero. But Republicans want his head, and they are pulling out all the stops to get it.  Multiple Republicans want him to resign, and a few are going so far as to want him court-martialed and sent up on treason charges.

 

Needless to say, the September 28th hearing is going to be vicious and ugly.

Empire State Gerrymandering

New York, unlike other blue states like California, isn't unilaterally disarming when it comes to redrawing congressional districts for 2022. The state is losing a district due to the census, but the GOP may soon find itself all but locked out of the US House delegation.

Seven years ago, New Yorkers voted decisively to empower a new bipartisan commission to do what self-interested politicians could not: draw new congressional district lines that were not gerrymandered to favor a particular party.

But as the panel prepares to unveil its proposed maps for the first time on Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers in New York and Washington are already laying the groundwork to cast them aside — plotting to use their supermajorities in Albany to draw new district boundaries for the next decade that might eliminate as many as five Republican-held seats.

The end result could drive one of the most consequential shifts in power in the country this redistricting cycle, the first since New York voters approved a 2014 ballot measure to curb gerrymandering.

Under the most aggressive scenarios, Democrats could emerge from 2022’s midterm elections with control of as many as 23 of New York’s 26 House seats in an all-out effort to prop up their chances of retaining control of Congress. For the first redistricting cycle in decades, Democrats control the Legislature and governor’s office, giving them the freedom to reshape districts without having to compromise with Republicans, who long held a lock on the State Senate.

“New York might be the biggest redistricting weapon for either party in the country,” said Dave Wasserman, a national elections analyst with the Cook Political Report.

Wielding it will almost certainly raise howls of protest from Republicans and expose Democrats to legal challenges and political charges that they are hypocritically turning their backs on the party’s promise to end gerrymandering, the practice that allows politicians to draw legislative lines in their party’s favor.

Just Monday, Chuck Schumer, the state’s senior senator and the Democratic majority leader in Washington, sought to rally senators on Capitol Hill in favor of a sweeping national elections bill that would override state laws like New York’s and outlaw “vicious gerrymandering, which further threatens to divide our politics.”

Yet with Republicans preparing to use their control of states like Texas, Florida and Georgia to pile up a dozen or more new red seats, Democrats seem intent on using New York’s laws to their advantage. Mr. Wasserman said that New York’s gains would likely be greater than others whose process was under single-party control, such as Texas, because those states have already been more thoroughly gerrymandered.

 

N ew York is doing what Texas, Georgia, and Florida are planning to do, which is exactly what the US Supreme Court ruled two years ago. Federal Courts have no business deciding state redistricting unless there's obvious voter suppression based on race, as in North Carolina. And even then, federal courts have no authority -- none -- to draw maps.

This is the GOP reaping what they have sewn.