Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

As Russia beefs up its border forces with Ukraine ahead of conflict and possible sanctions against Moscow and 3,000 US troops in Eastern Europe are now on high alert, Republicans here in the States are suddenly very interested in seeing President Biden take Vladimir Putin's position that Ukraine should drop any hope of NATO membership.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is calling on the Biden administration to drop longstanding U.S. support for Ukraine's eventual membership in NATO, arguing that a binding commitment to defend the country would undermine efforts to counter China.

Why it matters: Hawley is staking out a position increasingly supported by the Republican base but historically at odds with the mainstream GOP consensus still backed by his Senate colleagues.

Context: Former President George W. Bush and all NATO leaders agreed at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine and Georgia "will become" members of the alliance — though no specific roadmap was offered at the time. 

Russia, which vigorously opposed the accession of either former Soviet republic, went on to invade Georgia later that year, and Ukraine in 2014. As Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens to renew his invasion of Ukraine with a massive military buildup on its borders, he is demanding legal guarantees that the country will never be allowed into NATO. NATO has no plans to admit Ukraine any time soon but has refused to allow Putin to set limitations on its foundational "open-door policy."

Driving the news: Ahead of a pair of all-member Ukraine briefings for the House and Senate on Thursday, Hawley is asking for "clarity" from Secretary of State Antony Blinken on how Ukraine's future membership in NATO would serve U.S. interests, according to a letter obtained by Axios. 

Hawley said he supports sending assistance that Ukraine needs to defend itself, but contends that the U.S. interest "is not so strong" to warrant going to war with Russia.
Biden himself has ruled out sending troops to Ukraine but plans to deploy forces to eastern Europe to bolster NATO's defenses — a position overwhelmingly supported by Senate Republicans.

What they're saying: "Such a deployment can only detract from the U.S. military’s ability to ready and modernize forces to deter China in the Indo-Pacific," Hawley writes, arguing that "Americans’ security and prosperity rest upon our ability" to curtail Beijing's dominance. 

"But those opportunity costs pale in comparison to what would be expected — indeed, required — of the United States, were NATO actually to admit Ukraine as a member."
Pointing to the failure of NATO member states to spend 2% of their GDP on defense, Hawley called on Biden to rethink "basic assumptions" about U.S. foreign policy that have been "collapsed" by the rise of China.

 

Yeah, that's the GOP argument: NATO membership for Ukraine -- or for the United States mind you -- is pointless because of China.  It's a dumb argument even for a dim bulb like Hawley.

This is nothing new of course. Trump said for years that the US would be better off without NATO.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

We're now to the point where the whitewashing of history by screaming "CRITICAL RACE THEORY!!!!" every five seconds in order to "protect" kids from being made to feel "uncomfortable" about the origins of American slavery has reached the point where the First Amendment is being dismantled in the name of America's armed forces.

A Tennessee state legislator introduced a joint resolution to "reprimand" the Associated Press (AP) for publishing an article highlighting racism within the military's ranks, saying the outlet "engaged in the lowest form of yellow journalism."

The bill, reported by a CBS/ABC-affiliate, was proposed by Republican state Rep. Bud Hulsey, who objected to an AP story that ran back in May, entitled "Deep-rooted racism, discrimination permeate US military."

In the article, AP reporters Kat Stafford, James Laporta, Aaron Morrison and Helen Wieffering interviewed "current and former enlistees and officers in nearly every branch of the armed services" who "described a deep-rooted culture of racism and discrimination that stubbornly festers, despite repeated efforts to eradicate it."

Additionally, the AP found that the military "processed more than 750 complaints of discrimination by race or ethnicity from service members in the fiscal year 2020 alone."

Hulsey's resolution contends that because the AP found 750 complaints – when there are 425,000 members of the active-duty military – racism in the ranks, by his accounting, is "uncommon and not a largescale problem."

The "allegations that members of the U.S. military are racist and that the military itself accepts a culture of discrimination are not only blatantly false," the resolution reads, "but an insult to the brave men and women who combat racism and discrimination at home and around the globe."

It also adds that "the AP has engaged in the lowest form of yellow journalism and should be held accountable by the American public and their elected officials."

The publication, for its part, has firmly stood by the article in question. Kat Stafford, one of its authors, tweeted weeks ago that she and her colleagues "spent nearly a year interviewing dozens of service members and experts – some of whom could not speak publicly out of fear of retribution. We poured over copious documents & FOIAs. We did our homework. No matter how much one tries [to] deny it, racism does exist."

 

The one thing that white Christian Republicans will not tolerate is the notion that systemic racism still exists in 2022 in the glorious, perfect land of God's America. Racism is a "barbarous relic of the past" that can't exist because America is the greatest country in world history. The notion that racism is still alive not only offends them, they turn to the punitive powers of the state to harm those who point out racism is in fact alive and well.

The GOP would rather pass legislation officially reprimanding a news organization's reporting on racism than actually dealing with the systemic racism in place. That's what it means to be a Republican in 2022.

And let's remember, a large majority of Christian Republicans believe they are the most persecuted group in US history. 48% of Republicans believe Christians are persecuted, more than any group in the US: Black folk, Muslims, LGBTQ+, everyone. They believe Black Americans are the least persecuted group in America, only 27% believe Black folk are persecuted.

So yes, using the power of the state to punish the messenger is exactly on brand for them. It's authoritarian and theocratic, as well as racist and furthering white supremacy's power.

The most American thing imaginable.

North Of The Border, Con't

Federal agents raided the home of a Homeland Security border official this week in Michigan, and there are a hell of a lot of questions flying around as to why.

Federal agents have raided the house of a high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official as part of an unspecified investigation, The Detroit News has learned.

Neighbors and law enforcement officials confirmed the raid happened Friday at the home of Homeland Security Special Agent in Charge Vance Callender, who oversees operations in Michigan and Ohio. The search involved approximately 15 agents and lasted about six hours at a pea-green, Colonial-style home, east of downtown Royal Oak, according to an eyewitness.

News of the search has spread widely within the region's federal law enforcement community, raising questions about the conduct of a high-ranking federal official tasked with helping protect the nation's border with Canada. Callender heads a department that also investigates a wide range of crimes, including sex trafficking and child pornography, and enforces immigration and customs laws.

“First, it is important to emphasize that some rumors online about Special Agent-in-Charge Callender may be sensational; yet they are untrue," his lawyer, Nick Oberheiden, wrote in an email to The Detroit News. "With respect to allegations of an investigation, we refrain from further comments at this point — out of respect for SAC Callender’s credentials and his position.”

It is unclear what prompted the search, and Callender, 49, has not been charged with wrongdoing. He could not be reached for comment and a spokeswoman with Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not discuss Callender's job status.

“As public servants working for a law enforcement agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) takes allegations of misconduct very seriously," the spokeswoman said.

"Any allegations of misconduct are appropriately investigated, and any employee, regardless of rank or seniority, who has committed provable misconduct, will be held accountable. Where necessary, ICE works with federal and/or state and local law enforcement who may investigate such allegations. Per agency protocol, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) will also review the allegations.”

Callender has spent 26 years in law enforcement and overseen Homeland Security operations in Michigan and Ohio since January 2020. He previously served as the department's operations chief for Europe, Canada and Mexico. Most recently, Callender was tapped to coordinate Operation Allies Welcome, a department effort to resettle Afghan refugees. The operation is headquartered at Fort McCoy, a U.S. Army base in Wisconsin.

 

To recap, Mitch Callender is a career law enforcement professional who was in charge of major Homeland Security operations on the Canadian border. For all these federal agencies to be involved, the potential for wrongdoing must be sky high.

Feds don't raid the homes of career Homeland Security agents without a very, very good reason.

I suspect we'll have that reason soon.

Last Call For Follow The Money, Con't

Following the 2022 cash from corporate America and dark money donors finds that the bulk of political donations are going to the GOP, which has tens of millions on hand in 2022 more than they did in 2020, but it doesn't mean Dems are getting destroyed, either. Dems are having a record year in fact, especially at the national House and Senate fundraising levels, it just means Republicans have an even larger haul.

Major Republican organizations focused on winning back control of the House and the Senate ended last year with significantly more money than their Democratic counterparts, a reversal of past fortunes that suggests shifting momentum ahead of the midterm elections.

The new fundraising totals, revealed Monday in filings to the Federal Election Commission, showed both parties holding record amounts for the off-year of the congressional cycle. But the growth in the Republican cash hoard compared with the 2020 and 2018 cycles outstripped Democratic gains, as GOP donors, particularly those who give seven- and eight-figure checks, leaned into the effort to take back control of the House and the Senate this fall.

The Republican Party’s campaign committees for the House and the Senate, along with the super PACs affiliated with Republican House and Senate leadership, reported nearly $220 million in combined cash on hand on Dec. 31. By contrast, the corresponding Democratic organizations reported $176 million in cash reserves.

The same Democratic groups had nearly $161 million in cash on hand at this point in the 2020 cycle, about $50 million more than the corresponding Republican groups.

The disclosures come as Republican leaders have become increasingly confident about taking back control of the House and Democrats have begun to criticize each other publicly about the strategy for winning over voters. Some Democratic leaders say worries about the election environment and the sidelining of former president Donald Trump as a unifying target have diminished donor enthusiasm on their side.

“When you are a Democrat, you are raising money for a very-likely loss, so that is hard to get around,” said David Brock, the founder of American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC that supports Democratic candidates. “And in 2018 and 2020, there was a good chunk of anti-Trump money that is not coming back unless he is the nominee again.”

But several other Democrats said the relative drop-off is less important than the eye-popping amounts of money that both parties have been able to harness. President Biden’s party, they say, will have enough money down the stretch. They also noted that cash-on-hand figures for the end of the year are just a single snapshot of time, which does not take into account spending last year or fundraising that is in the pipeline for later this year.

“House Democrats’ record-breaking fundraising shows we’re ready to compete across the battleground and make sure voters know just how dangerous Republicans’ extremist agenda is,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Chris Taylor said in a statement.

A clear bright spot for Democrats came at the national party level, which funds field operations in the states that can benefit House and Senate campaigns. With Biden in the White House, the Democratic National Committee ended last year with $65 million in cash, compared with just $10 million at the start of 2020 and $6.6 million at the start of 2018.

The Republican National Committee reported $56 million in cash at the end of 2021.

Democrats also took solace in the strong fundraising for some of their 2022 candidates, which does not show up in the filings for party committees and their corresponding outside groups. Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) reported collecting $9.8 million in the last three months of the year, compared with $5.4 million for former football star Herschel Walker, who has been endorsed by Trump as the Republican candidate for his seat.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) raised about $9 million in the same period, compared with $1.4 million for finance executive Blake Masters and $800,000 for Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who are competing for the Republican nomination.

“While Republicans put forward flawed candidates that are locked in vicious primaries, this record-breaking fundraising quarter for Democrats shows the power of our grass roots support,” said Jazmin Vargas, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The DSCC ended the year with $23.7 million in cash on hand, compared with $32.8 million for its counterpart, the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

 

In other words, DNC chair Jaime Harrison, DCCC head Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, and DSCC head Sen. Gary Peters are all pulling in record hauls. They are raising hundreds of millions, which is what the Dems need. They are getting the job done.

 

The issue of course is that the GOP has even more cash on hand. Raising the cash is one thing, making it work, well, Dems have had issues with that in the past (look at Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who raised tens of millions and got destroyed in 2014.)  Money? Dems can do that. Win with that money? We will see.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Black History Month here in America begins with an awful reminder that violent racism is the default for the country and that it has been for centuries.

A growing number of historically black colleges and universities have had to lock down or postpone classes due to bomb threats on the first day of Black History Month. 

At least 13 HBCUs reported bomb threats Tuesday. At least one of them, Howard University, also received a bomb threat Monday. 

Coppin State University 

Someone called the Baltimore university and said there was a bomb on campus, Coppin State University spokesperson Angela Galeano told CNN. 

The threat was immediately reported to campus police, Galeano said. 

A message on the university's website said all classes would be online Tuesday. 

"If you are on campus, please, shelter in place, and wait for further instructions," the message said. "Emergency officials are evaluating the campus and we will provide updates, as soon as possible."

Mississippi Valley State University 

The university said a bomb threat was received through its guardhouse early Tuesday morning. 

"MVSU is currently on lockdown, and campus police are conducting a complete investigation," a university Facebook post reads. 

"School officials are working with local emergency personnel to investigate and determine the extent of the threat." 

Classes will be remote Tuesday, and the university is asking all on-campus students to stay in their residence halls. Only essential staff will be allowed on campus, MVSU said.

Alcorn State University 

The university in Lorman, Mississippi, received "an anonymous bomb threat," Alcorn State posted on its website Tuesday. 

"We are advising all students to shelter in place," the message said. "Faculty and staff should not report to work until further notice."

 

There were bomb threats at another dozen or more HBCU's today, and there were several yesterday as well. No devices have been found, but that's not the point. White supremacist terrorism directed at Black colleges and universities is the point and it's working.

There's no reason to believe these threats will stop, or that anyone will be punished for them. They can come from anywhere.

This is what Black History Month means to white supremacists: open season on Black terror, as America itself has been built on Black terror and blood for decades. 

Black Lives Still Matter.

The Big Lie, Con't

Yes, Donald Trump absolutely wanted to send in local and state police, Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and/or the US military to seize voting machines in several key states in order to declare the 2020 election fraudulent, and to then declare victory.

Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines.

Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Giuliani to make that inquiry after rejecting a separate effort by his outside advisers to have the Pentagon take control of the machines. And the outreach to the Department of Homeland Security came not long after Mr. Trump, in an Oval Office meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr, raised the possibility of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a previously undisclosed suggestion that Mr. Barr immediately shot down.

The new accounts show that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals to use his national security agencies to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the episodes.

The existence of proposals to use at least three federal departments to assist Mr. Trump’s attempt to stay in power has been publicly known. The proposals involving the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security were codified by advisers in the form of draft executive orders.

But the new accounts provide fresh insight into how the former president considered and to some degree pushed the plans, which would have taken the United States into uncharted territory by using federal authority to seize control of the voting systems run by states on baseless grounds of widespread voting fraud.

The people familiar with the matter were briefed on the events by participants or had firsthand knowledge of them.

The accounts about the voting machines emerged after a weekend when Mr. Trump declared at a rally in Texas that he might pardon people charged in connection with the storming of the Capitol last Jan. 6 if he were re-elected. In a statement issued after the rally, Mr. Trump also suggested that his vice president, Mike Pence, could have personally “overturned the election” by refusing to count delegates to the Electoral College who had vowed to cast their votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The new information helps to flesh out how the draft executive orders to seize voting machines came into existence and points in particular to the key role played by a retired Army colonel named Phil Waldron.

According to people familiar with the accounts, Mr. Waldron, shortly after the election, began telling associates that he had found irregularities in vote results that he felt were suggestive of fraud. He then came up with the idea of having a federal agency like the military or the Department of Homeland Security confiscate the machines to preserve evidence.

Mr. Waldron first proposed the notion of the Pentagon’s involvement to Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, whom he says he served with in the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The plans were among an array of options that were placed before Mr. Trump in the tumultuous days and weeks that followed the election, developed by an ad hoc group of lawyers like Sidney Powell and other allies including Mr. Flynn and Mr. Waldron. That group often found itself at odds with Mr. Giuliani and his longtime associate Bernard Kerik, as well as with Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and his team.

Around the same time that Mr. Trump brought up the possibility of having the Justice Department seize the voting machines, for example, he also tried to persuade state lawmakers in contested states like Michigan and Pennsylvania to use local law enforcement agencies to take control of them, people familiar with the matter said. The state lawmakers refused to go along with the plan.

Once again the only reason we're not in a Trump authoritarian regime right now is because his people got cold feet: Mike Pence huddling in his office, Rudy Giuliani screaming on the phones, Bill Barr being stonefaced at Justice, Chris Miller at the Pentagon, all of these folks too cowardly to pull the trigger.

We have a democracy still because Trump surrounded himself with spineless hacks. 

The next time America falls into the abyss.

Last Call For The Rent Is Too Damn High, Con't

Rent's due tomorrow, and inflation, lack of affordable housing, and massive corporate takeover of rental properties means rent is skyrocketing across the country, and millions once again face eviction into the winter cold of the omicron pandemic.

Kiara Age moved in less than a year ago and now it’s time to move again: Rent on her two-bedroom apartment in Henderson, Nev., is rising 23 percent to nearly $1,600 a month, making it impossibly out of reach for the single mother.

Age makes $15 an hour working from home as a medical biller while also caring for her 1-year-old son, because she can’t afford child care. By the time she pays rent — which takes up more than half of her salary — and buys groceries, there’s little left over.

“I am trying to figure out what I can do,” said Age, 32, who also has an 8-year-old daughter. “Rent is so high that I can’t afford anything.”

Rental prices across the country have been rising for months, but lately the increases have been sharper and more widespread, forcing millions of Americans to reassess their living situations.

Average rents rose 14 percent last year, to $1,877 a month, with cities like Austin, New York and Miami notching increases of as much as 40 percent, according to real estate firm Redfin. And Americans expect rents will continue to rise — by about 10 percent this year — according to a report released this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At the same time, many local rent freezes and eviction moratoriums have already expired.

“Rents really shot up in the second half of 2021,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. “The pandemic was kind of a pause on the economy and now that things are reopening, inflation is picking up, rents are going up and people are realizing they don’t have as much disposable income as they might have thought they had.”

Higher rent prices are also expected to be a key driver of inflation in coming months. Housing costs make up a third of the U.S. consumer price index, which is calculated based on the going rate of home rentals. But economists say there is a lag of 9 to 12 months before rising rents show up in inflation measures. As a result, even if inflation were to subside for all other components of the consumer price index, rising rents alone could keep inflation levels elevated through the year, said Frank Nothaft, chief economist at real estate data firm CoreLogic.

While the Federal Reserve’s likely interest rate increases are expected to slow soaring housing costs — already mortgage rates have been trending higher, which tends to cool the real estate market — the restraint on rental prices is expected to be much less direct and take longer to filter through.

In the meantime, the Biden administration has begun reallocating unused funds from its $46.5 billion Emergency Rental Assistance program to help residents with rent and utility payments in cities such as Washington, D.C., Houston and San Diego. President Biden has also vowed to add nearly 100,000 affordable homes over the next three years by providing low-cost funding to qualifying developers, and encouraging states and local governments to reduce zoning and financing rules for affordable housing.

The pandemic has exacerbated inequalities in many parts of life, and housing is no different. Homeowners benefited from rock-bottom interest rates and surging home prices, while renters have faced surging costs with little reprieve. And unlike markups in other categories — such as food or gas, where prices can waver in both directions — economists say annual leases and long-term mortgages make it unlikely that housing costs will come back down quickly once they rise.

Eleven million households, or 1 in 4 renters, spend more than half of their monthly income on rent, according to an analysis of 2018 census data by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, though experts say that figure is likely even higher now.

“The fact is, for too many Americans, housing is unaffordable,” said Dennis Shea, executive director of the J. Ronald Terwilliger Center for Housing Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “We have an inadequate supply of homes — for both rent and for sale — and of course the lowest income families are being hit hardest.”

In interviews with renters around the country, many said their monthly payments had recently risen or were set to go up in the coming weeks. Multiple people said that despite local rent freezes, their management companies had found ways to increase monthly dues by tacking on new “amenity fees” or charging for services like trash collection that had previously been included.

Many said they began looking for other rental options, only to find that everything around them had gone up in price, too. Some said they’re considering relocating altogether — from Austin to Richmond, or New York City to Dover, Del.

 

So millions of Americans are facing eviction, and rents that are completely unaffordable. Even with assistance from the Biden administration, state, and local programs, a whole lot of Americans are going to be out on the street in the months ahead, with nowhere to go.

 

We're looking at a major, fundamental shift in the labor market.  People can't afford to be near their jobs anymore, so they have to move further away or quit altogether and look for work in another city or state, which of course they can't afford.

 

We've managed to delay the rental disaster through 2021, but 2022 is when it all catches up with us. People can't afford rent increases of 10%, let alone 40%.

 

It's going to get bad, folks.  It's going to be the story of 2022.

School Of Hard-Right Knocks, Con't

Terrified public school educators are now auto-banning books from classrooms to prevent any whiff of controversy from "Critical Race Theory", which was the entire point of the exercise over the last six months. and it will continue until every last vestige of American history is whitewashed into oblivion in schools across the country.

An acclaimed MLK-themed novel was removed from a 10th-grade English class in North Carolina. Haywood County Superintendent Dr. Bill Nolte told Popular Information that he pulled the book, Dear Martin by Nic Stone, in a matter of hours after receiving one parent complaint. Nolte said he did not read the book — or even obtain a copy — prior to making the decision.

The 10th-grade parent, Tim Reeves, addressed the Haywood County School Board on January 10. Reeves said that his son received Dear Martin in 10th-grade English class on January 6. Reeves learned from his son that the book contained "explicit language" including the "f-word," the "s-word," and "GD." Reeves said that he was "appalled." He said the "language" and "sexual innuendos" in the book are "concerning to me as a parent."

Reeves acknowledged that his son hears "lots of language every day" but objected to its inclusion in a "textbook." Reeves suggested that providing Dear Martin to 10th graders violated the "age of consent" because "they are still adolescents."

Dear Martin "tells the story of an Ivy League-bound African American student named Justyce who becomes a victim of racial profiling." The book covers Justyce's "experiences at his mostly White prep school and the fallout from his brief detainment." In the book, Justyce's diary includes a letter to King in which Justyce explains how he sought to emulate the civil rights icon.

Stone's book was a finalist for the American Library Association's William C. Morris Award, a New York Times #1 bestseller, and was named one of TIME Magazine's top 100 young adult books of all time. Common Sense Media, a non-profit that evaluates books and other media for children, found the book was appropriate for 14-year-olds, who are typically in 9th grade. It also awarded the book 5 out of 5 stars for "overall quality."

When Reeves arrived at the School Board at the meeting, however, Nolte told him that he had removed Dear Martin from 10th grade English class.

In an interview, Nolte told Popular Information that he first heard from Reeves about his concerns "earlier that day." According to Nolte, Reeves had previously spoken to the high school principal who offered to provide an alternative text for Reeves' son. But Reeves was not satisfied and wanted the school to remove the text from the class.

Nolte said that, before making the decision to remove the book, he did not have an opportunity to "read all of it." Instead, Nolte "talked to some people who had read different sections of it" and "looked at some of the parts of it that were published online." Nolte also said he "didn't talk to the teacher at all about why she picked that text."

Nolte then concluded that "the amount of profanity and other descriptions or images in it" made Dear Martin inappropriate for a 10th-grade English class. There is no blanket prohibition on novels with profanity but Nolte said he was concerned with the frequency. "I made the best judgment I could make I feel pretty comfortable with it," Nolte concluded.

Nolte's approach appears inconsistent with the official policies of Haywood County Public Schools. Under the policy, a parent "may submit an objection in writing to the principal regarding the use of particular instructional materials." (Reeves did email the principal about his objection.) Then the principal "may establish a committee to review the objection" or make the decision themselves. Only if the principal or committee disagrees with the parent may "the decision of the committee or principal be appealed to the superintendent." In this case, Nolte says that he made the decision himself on the same day the complaint was filed. There is no indication that the principal rejected the objection or was even given the opportunity to decide.

Nolte's decision is also part of a larger trend of removing books that deal with marginalized communities based on alleged concerns about profanity.

 

When you remember the point is to cripple and destroy public education for 95% of American kids, to render it useless across the country, to shutter schools, fire teachers and educators, and sell off buildings and land and telling parents "You wanted school choice, arrange your own kids' education now, we won't do it" then all of this makes sense. In the last two years alone, public education has been gutted in America.

 

There's no whiff of recovery anytime soon. We're looking at a generation of kids without the basics of a K-12 education, even by America's dismal standards, where the "negative" parts of America's history are obliterated, as Greg Sargent warns.

We’re seeing dozens of GOP proposals to bar whole concepts from classrooms outright. The Republican governor of Virginia has debuted a mechanism for parents to rat out teachers. Bills threatening punishment of them are proliferating. Book-banning efforts are outpacing anything in recent memory.

Amid this onslaught, a proposed bill now advancing in the New Hampshire legislature deserves renewed scrutiny. It would ban the advocacy of any “doctrine” or “theory” promoting a “negative” account of U.S. history, including the notion that the United States was “founded on racism.”

Additionally, the bill describes itself as designed to ensure teachers’ “loyalty,” while prohibiting advocacy of “subversive doctrines.”

This proposal is drawing heightened attention from teachers and their representatives. With the push for constraints on teachers intensifying, they worry that if it succeeds, it could become a model in other states.

“It’s the next step in their campaign to whitewash our history by rewriting it,” Megan Tuttle, the president of the New Hampshire chapter of the National Education Association, told me in a statement.

If this passes, it will “stifle real discussion" in classrooms, Tuttle said, adding: “Then it’s only a matter of time before similar legislation has the same impact on classrooms around the country.”

 

We've already seen how easy it is to control the ignorant and weaponize them into an army of dullards, a confederacy of Confederate dunces. Imagine that being our future for decades to come.

 

That's where all this is headed.

The Big Lie, Con't

As Will Bunch points out, over the weekend in Texas, Trump all but promised a violent uprising across America if any of the state cases against him in New York, Georgia, or anywhere else result in indictments against him or his family.

 

Amid the predictable reiterations of the Big Lie that Biden’s legitimate 2020 election was stolen and his other narcissistic blather, Trump’s lengthy speech in Conroe contained three elements that marked a dangerous escalation of his post-presidential, post-Jan. 6 rhetoric. Let’s digest and analyze each of them:

— For the first time, Trump — if somehow elected again in 2024 and upon returning to the White House in January 2025 — dangled pardons before people convicted of crimes in the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill. “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he told the rally, adding: “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.” The statement raises as many questions as it answers — for example, was he including many or all of the more than 700 mostly low-level insurrectionists, or sending a message to his higher-up friends like Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows and others who could be subject to criminal probes?

But two things are clear. The first is that Trump — facing probes over Jan. 6 in Georgia and possibly from the U.S. Justice Department — is committing a form of obstruction of justice in full public view, since the future possibility of a pardon offers an incentive to stay on the ex-president’s good side and not testify against him. The other is that abusing the constitutional power of a presidential pardon — intended by the framers for grace and true clemency — to clear the jails of his political allies is banana republic-type stuff, the ultimate rock bottom made inevitable when Trump was allowed to abuse his pardon powers while in office 2017-21.

— In a sign that Trump is increasingly worried about the overlapping probes — the remarkable evidence uncovered by the House Jan. 6 Committee that will likely be referred to the Justice Department, the Fulton County grand jury investigation into Georgia election tampering, and the unrelated probe into dodgy Trump family finances in New York, he explicitly called for mob action if charges are lodged in any of these jurisdictions. Said Trump: “If these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had ... in Washington D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”

Of course, the last time that Trump used his megaphone to summon a large crowd (”Will be wild!” he famously tweeted) was last Jan. 6, and we all remember how that “protest” turned out. Experts call Trump’s practices here “stochastic terrorism” — broad statements in the media that are meant to stoke spontaneous acts of violence, in this case to intimidate the prosecutors or even the grand jurors who are weighing charges against Trump. While his Jan. 6 exhortations were the prelude to an attempted coup, Trump’s incendiary remarks in Conroe sound like a call for a new civil war — naming both the locales and the casus belli.

— But let’s take a step back and drill down on arguably the most important and alarming word in Trump’s statement: “Racist.” At first blush, it seems to come out of left field, in the sense of what could be racist about looking into a white man’s role in an attempted coup or his cooked financial books? Except that it happens that three of the key prosecutors investigating Trump — the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, Fani Willis, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, and new Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg — as well as the chair of the House committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, are all Black.

Thus, it’s both alarming and yet utterly predictable that Trump would toss the gasoline of racial allegations onto his flaming pile of grievances, knowing how that will play with the Confederate flag aficionados within the ex-president’s cult. In tying skin color into his call for mobs in Atlanta or New York, Trump is seeking to start a race war — no different, really, from Dylann Roof. Roof used a .45-caliber Glock handgun, while Trump uses a podium and the services of fawning right-wing cable TV networks. Sadly, the latter method could prove more effective.

What happened in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday night was not politics. A politician seeking to regain the White House might craft a narrative around Biden’s struggles with inflation or with COVID-19 and make a case — no matter how absurd, given Trump’s failings on the pandemic and elsewhere — that he could do better for the voters. But increasingly Trump is less a politician and more the leader of a politics-adjacent cult. He does not want to make America great again so much as he wants to keep Donald Trump out of prison, and the most narcissistic POTUS of all time is willing to rip the United States in two to make this happen.

Trump’s chief weapons are fear and intimidation. To save American democracy, the people tasked with getting to the bottom of a former president’s high crimes and misdemeanors — on Capitol Hill and in those key courthouses — must be ready for the violence that Trump is inciting, and must summon the courage to finish their job. My fear is that Trump’s speech in Conroe will live in infamy — but the only reason it happened at all is because we have not held Trump to account for attempting to wreck American democracy on Jan. 6 ... not yet. Now, Trump has told us in no uncertain terms how he plans to break the nation this time. We can act forcefully to stop his new insurrection and punish his past crimes — or we can sit back and let the comet of autocracy strike.

 

I've said this before. Indictments against Trump mean that the local and state prosecutors have to be ready to defend themselves from lethal violence, targeting prosecutors, judges, court staff, jails and more. It means that the law enforcement agencies attached to defend these institutions will be called upon to do so, but it also means the law enforcement agents, individually, will be called upon by Trump to allow the violence to happen.

 

Trump is straight up telling people if they are involved in the violence, that he will pardon them when President. 

 

Trump needs to be in prison, right now, for obstruction of justice. It was witnessed by the world.

 

It'll never happen, of course.

The Great Canadian Trucker War, Con't

A couple of weeks back I warned that Canadian PM Justin Trudeau's decision to require truckers entering Canada to be vaccinated could have far-reaching effects. Now we see that Canada is facing thousands of protesting truckers in the capital of Ottawa, so many that Trudeau and other politicians have been moved from the city to an undisclosed location for safety.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Canada’s capital on Saturday to protest vaccine mandates, masks and lockdowns.

Some parked on the grounds of the National War Memorial and danced on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, others carried signs and flags with swastikas and some used the statue of Canadian hero Terry Fox to display an anti-vaccine statement, sparking widespread condemnation.

“I am sickened to see protesters dance on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and desecrate the National War Memorial. Generations of Canadians have fought and died for our rights, including free speech, but not this. Those involved should hang their heads in shame,” tweeted Gen. Wayne Eyre, Canada’s Defense Staff chief.

Protestors compared vaccine mandates to fascism, one truck carried a Confederate flag and many carried expletive-laden signs targeting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The statue of Fox, a national hero who lost a leg to bone cancer as a youngster, then set off in 1980 on a fundraising trek across Canada, was draped with a upside down Canadian flag with a sign that said “mandate freedom.”

Trudeau retweeted a statement from The Terry Fox Foundation that said “Terry believed in science and gave his life to help others.”

Eric Simmons, from Oshawa, Ontario, said all vaccine mandates should be ended.

“They’re not effective, they’re not working. It’s not changing anything. We can’t keep living like this. People are losing their jobs because they don’t want to get the vaccine,” Simmons said.

The convoy of truckers and others prompted police to prepare for the possibility of violence and warn residents to avoid downtown. A top Parliament security official advised lawmakers to lock their doors amid reports their private homes may be targeted.

Trudeau has said Canadians are not represented by this “very troubling, small but very vocal minority of Canadians who are lashing out at science, at government, at society, at mandates and public health advice.″

The prime minister’s itinerary for the day usually says he is in Ottawa if he’s at home, but on Saturday it said “National Capital Region” amid a report he’s been moved to an undisclosed location. One of Trudeau’s kids has COVID-19 and the prime minister has been isolating and working remotely.

Canada has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and the premier of the province of Quebec who is proposing to tax the unvaccinated is popular.

Some are, in part, protesting a new rule that took effect Jan. 15 requiring truckers entering Canada be fully immunized against the coronavirus. The United States has imposed the same requirement on truckers entering that country.

The Canadian Trucking Alliance said a great number of the protesters have no connection to the trucking industry, adding they have a separate agenda to push. The alliance notes the vast majority of drivers are vaccinated.

The organizers of the protest have called for the forceful elimination of all COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates and some called for the removal of Trudeau.

 

Needless to say, things are tense in Ottawa right now. We'll see how this weekend continues, but at this point I would expect Trudeau to address the nation today or tomorrow.

Sunday Long Read: The Street Fighters

Our Sunday Long Read is NBC's Tim Hayden recounting the story he did on US skiing champion Picabo Street in 1998 for the Nagano Olympics, and the path Street has taken since then leading up to the premiere of her Peacock documentary this week ahead of the Beijing Winter Games.

This is a new story about an old story, and about a documentary film that is part highlight reel and part confessional; about a once-famous ski racer and the disorienting ecosystem of the Olympic Games. It is about public faces, fungible narratives, and family secrets, and more broadly, about the strange, flawed, and mutually mercenary relationship that always exists between writers and subjects. It is about time passing, and wounds healing. It begins almost 24 years ago, on Valentine’s Day morning of 1998, in the alpine resort of Hakuba, 30 miles from the Olympic city of Nagano, and where I was covering the Games, and specifically, Alpine skiing, for Sports Illustrated.

After breakfast that day, I walked from my little mountain condo, past vacation homes and small inns to a nearby convenience store, as I had done nearly every day. It was sunny, with cotton ball clouds, and snow was piled in colossal formations at the side of the narrow roadway, and bestride every driveway. The '98 Olympics had been even more cursed by weather than usual, with two rip-snorting blizzards and one torrential rainstorm, and this fickle weather had upended the racing schedule and become part of the story of the Games. Races had been postponed and re-scheduled multiple times, leaving athletes uncertain and unmoored (or in one high-profile instance, relieved).

On the way back to my condo, I ran into Ron Street, the then-59-year-old father of the top U.S. racer, 27-year-old Picabo Street. The family and several friends had been living in a ski home in the woods, a place called Log Haven, not far from the SI condo. Our meeting was vaguely awkward. Picabo had come to the Games just 14 months after a terrible crash and knee injury and only 12 days after a concussion but she had won a surprising gold medal in the Olympic Super-G, an event she had never won on the World Cup circuit. The downhill, her specialty, lay ahead. It was clear by then that she would be featured prominently in my weekly magazine story, which was still a significant thing in largely pre-digital 1998. Seeking some access to distinguish that piece, I had asked Picabo’s agent to let me spend some time inside Log Haven, for color. That access had been promised, and then pulled back, which happens. Shrug.

That morning I said a cautious hello to Ron, a solidly-built stonemason and ex-Marine with a salt-and-pepper beard, whose big personality and storytelling flair had made him a conduit for amplifying the (very true) Picabo narrative about a close-knit family from rural Idaho that raised one of the best American women’s downhillers in history. (There’s nothing in sportswriting quite like a colorful parent or sibling to add ballast to profiles). Ron knew that I had been trying to get embedded, and had failed. "Man, I’m sorry," he said. He had his hands in his pockets, shuffling his feet, sure signs of a source who is about to unload, with just a little nudge. Which he did.

Ron told me that things had been uneasy inside Log Haven, culminating in a family-and-friends throwdown early that morning when members of the entourage came in very late from a night of partying downtown. He was frustrated and angry, and in no small part worried about his daughter’s readiness. "There used to be just a few of us, and we could go anywhere we wanted," he said. "Now we need three cars and we’re an entourage." Classic angle: Trouble in paradise. It was, as we say in the biz, good stuff.

Two days later, under blue skies and on hillsides, cleared of powder and transformed into icy race hills, Street finished sixth in the downhill, missing a bronze by .17 seconds. We talked afterward, and she acknowledged the unrest that her father had relayed to me. "We vibrate on a high level in our family," she said. She also said that she missed a medal because — after all those crashes, "… I didn’t want to go into the fence." It was Monday midday in Japan, Sunday night back at the SI offices in New York, which meant that I was on deadline.

I wrote a story that was equal parts Street and men’s double gold medalist Hermann Maier of Austria, for whom weather delays enabled recovery from a legendary downhill crash. The magazine, dated Feb. 23, 1998, featured my friend Carl Yarbrough’s remarkable shot of an airborne Maier on the cover, and inside, another of Carl’s images, this one of Street winning the Super-G, under the headline: Street Fighting. My story paired up Maier and Street and suggested strongly that the weather had allowed Maier to heal and Team Street to come unglued. I did not dismiss Street’s assertion that caution — and not family unrest — had slowed her downhill run, but I made it the B Side, a conscious choice.

Picabo did not like the story. She wrote a book that was published in 2001, in which she suggested that I had staked out their family’s rental home in Japan and underplayed her belief that it was self-preservation that slowed her, ever so slightly, in the downhill. Fair enough. In advance of the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, I requested interviews with Picabo, and she declined. All of the above comes with the territory. She retired after those 2002 Games, and I went on, covering other skiers, which is the customary process in our worlds. That was that.

But it felt unfinished. Last Friday the documentary Picabo premiered on Peacock. Among those behind the project is Lindsey Vonn, who first idolized Street and then succeeded her as the best U.S. women’s speed skier in history (and went on to become the best speed skier, male or female, period). Also involved is Hollywood veteran and Olympic enthusiast (and former USOPC vice president) Frank Marshall. It is ostensibly the story of Street’s non-traditional upbringing, unlikely stardom and very adult struggles, but also a reckoning with scars kept hidden. (Peacock is owned by, and I am employed by NBC, so it’s inappropriate for me to offer a recommendation. But if you are new to the Picabo Street story, this will get you caught up).

The film tells of a family that lived at the base of a steep hillside in Triumph, Idaho and grew its own food, and of a little girl named after a Native American word for "Shining Waters." That was the broad-strokes narrative that followed Street onto the world stage. But the harsher backbone of the film is Street’s complex relationship with her father, a man she idolized, but whom she also describes as engaging in abusive behavior with her mother, while she and her older brother, Baba, were children, lying awake. "If you wake up to your parents fighting, you know it," Street told Vonn in the film. "There’s a certain thump on the floor, there’s a certain sound of a slap, there’s a certain velocity of voice that stays with you forever."

Baba Street, in the film, says, "An attribute about dad that a lot of people didn’t know is that he would give you the shirt off his back, he was an extremely giving person. But he also carried a lot of anger in his life."

This was the family secret that Picabo kept buried throughout a decade-long rise to the top of the ski racing world and into the homes of American Olympic television viewers. It’s the secret that she took to Nagano, and which I almost stumbled upon, but not quite.

 

How different would things have been for Street and her career if the story of 1998 had been her family issues and not her performance? Would it have changed the lives of others for better or worse? We don't know, but looking back at it, it's certainly worth considering.

Hillbilly Elegy Energy Controversy

Here in Cincy, author-turned-racist JD Vance is holding an event with Marjorie Taylor Greene, or trying to, that is if they can find a venue.

 

The management at the Landing Event Center in suburban Cincinnati didn't know much about the event that was scheduled for Sunday, the general manager told The Enquirer.

Just that a client asked to rent the Loveland, Ohio space for an event that involved "Hillbilly Elegy" author and Senate candidate J.D. Vance.

Then on Thursday, General Manager Jodi Taylor logged on to her computer. A flood of messages on social media and emails greeted her from people angry about the event. And calls started coming in.

The event was a "meet-and-greet" with J.D. Vance and controversial Georgia Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who just endorsed Vance.

The event has been moved from the Landing Event Center in Loveland to the Marriott Cincinnati Northeast in Mason.

In an email, Vance's campaign said the event was moved due to a large number of RSVPs.

The change in venues highlights the difficult situation political events create for venue owners.

After discussing it with the owners, the management felt they weren't in a position to hold the event, Taylor said. She said they didn't know it was open to the public and would have an unknown number of people, she said.

"We just chose to respect it was a very emotional topic," Taylor said. "People are passionate about what they believe. We were wrapping our heads around what was going on. We didn't know there would be a guest."

They asked Vance's campaign to find another location.

Then management posted a notice on its Facebook page.

"Due to the tremendous interest in the JD Vance presentation that was scheduled to take place here this Sunday, it has been relocated to the Marriott NE located in Deerfield Twp. We appreciate everyone's interest and concerns."

The Landing Event Center didn't want to jump into the politics, Taylor said.

"It doesn’t matter what we do," Taylor said. "We have both sides upset."

Activists are now trying to stop Greene and Vance's appearance in Mason. The Mason-Deerfield Township Democratic Club and others have shared a link encouraging people to call the Marriott, reserve seats to take up space and ask the Mason mayor to take a stand.

As of Saturday morning, the event is still a go for Mason, according to Vance's campaign.

 

Both Vance and Greene should be either hawking horse dewormer on FOX or in jail. Neither one should be an elected anything, or running for a damn thing, but here we are. They especially shouldn't be doing political events in Cincy, but, ugh.

 

And yet there's a not-zero chance both of them are in leadership positions in Congress in 2023.

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

A five-judge panel on Pennsylvania's state Commonwealth Court has ruled the state's Republican-created vote-by-mail law to be unconstitutional, setting up a state Supreme Court showdown for November.

A Pennsylvania court struck down the state’s expansive mail-in voting law as unconstitutional, delivering a temporary win to state Republicans who challenged the law after former president Donald Trump falsely claimed mail-in voting resulted in election fraud.

While the two-year-old law was struck down by a majority of the five-judge panel of the Commonwealth Court, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) and the state’s Attorney General, Josh Shapiro (D), promised a swift appeal, criticizing the court’s opinion as being “based on twisted logic and faulty reasoning.”

“The administration will immediately appeal this decision to the state Supreme Court and today’s lower court ruling will have no immediate effect on mail-in voting pending a final decision on the appeal,” Wolf said Friday.

The state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed the law establishing no-excuse mail-in voting for all voters in 2019 with bipartisan support. Previously, Pennsylvania voters could cast absentee ballots if they met certain criteria.

Amid the pandemic, more than 2.6 million Pennsylvania voters cast mail-in or absentee ballots out of 6.9 million.

The court said Friday that any changes to the voting law would require a constitutional amendment.

“No-excuse mail-in voting makes the exercise of the franchise more convenient and has been used four times in the history of Pennsylvania. Approximately 1.38 million voters have expressed their interest in voting by mail permanently,” Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt wrote. “If presented to the people, a constitutional amendment to end the Article VII, Section 1 requirement of in-person voting is likely to be adopted. But a constitutional amendment must be presented to the people and adopted into our fundamental law before legislation authorizing no-excuse mail-in voting can ‘be placed upon our statute books.’ ”

In bringing the legal challenge, some Republicans in the state echoed Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and his criticism of mail-in voting, with several seeking to undo the law for which they they once voted.

In a statement to The Washington Post, Wolf pointed out the GOP reversal.

“The Republican-controlled legislature passed Act 77 with strong bipartisan support in 2019 to make voting more safe, secure, and accessible and millions of Pennsylvanians have embraced it,” Wolf said. “The simple fact is that despite near-unanimous Republican legislative support for this historic update to Pennsylvania election law, they now want to strip away mail-in voting in the service of the ‘big lie.’”

Shapiro, in his statement, stressed that the court’s ruling will not have “any immediate impact” on upcoming elections. The state is holding both gubernatorial and a U.S. Senate election this year.

The Pennsylvania Department of State also said in a statement that it disagreed with the ruling and that it is “working to file an immediate appeal” to the state’s Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Democratic majority.

 

Pennsylvania Republicans overwhelming passed no-excuse by-mail absentee balloting, then declared it fraudulent, then sued to destroy the law because they argued their own law never should have passed.

That's the GOP for you. Whatever they are saying they are doing, it actually begins with voter suppression and disenfranchisement on a massive scale.

States are not engaging in trying to suppress voters whatsoever,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared last year.

Facts on the ground in Georgia tell a different story. A new data analysis by Mother Jones shows that the number of voters disenfranchised by rejected mail ballot applications skyrocketed after the GOP-controlled legislature passed sweeping new restrictions on mail voting last year. The law enacted in March 2021 shortened the time people have to request and return mail ballots, prohibited election officials from sending such applications to all voters, added new ID requirements, and dramatically curtailed the use of ballot drop boxes, among other changes.

During municipal elections in November, Georgia voters were 45 times more likely to have their mail ballot applications rejected—and ultimately not vote as a result—than in 2020. If that same rejection rate were extrapolated to the 2020 race, more than 38,000 votes would not have been cast in a presidential contest decided by just over 11,000 votes.

 

Tens of thousands of voters are being disenfranchised by new GOP-created suppression laws. They are there for a reason, to keep the most marginal voters from being counted. In the end, Republicans want fewer voters and fewer votes, to chock off democracy.

It's the only way they can win and they know it.

The Dragon Roars Loudly

China is apparently picking this week to deliver a very pointed message to President Biden over Taiwan as tensions ratchet up between Russia and the US over Ukraine.

China's ambassador to the United States issued a warning Thursday: The U.S. could face "military conflict" with China over the future status of Taiwan.

In his first one-on-one interview since assuming his post in Washington, D.C., last July, Qin Gang accused Taiwan of "walking down the road toward independence," and added, "If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in a military conflict."

It was an unusually direct statement about the U.S. and Taiwan. Observers say China usually speaks in more general terms, such as saying that the U.S. is "playing with fire."

Though American eyes may be focused thousands of miles away toward a threatened war in Ukraine, U.S. officials and analysts have voiced increasing concern about Taiwan's ability to defend itself. This week, 39 Chinese military aircraft flew near Taiwan, the latest of several such demonstrations. It's widely believed that the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the event of war, though no formal treaty requires it to do so.

Ambassador Qin spoke of Taiwan at his official residence Thursday, where he welcomed NPR's team to discuss U.S. relations with China and the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing. He is a veteran diplomat who previously served as the chief of foreign affairs protocol for China's President Xi Jinping.

Qin arrived in Washington last year at a time of bipartisan disappointment with China. It's widely conceded in Washington that a decades-long policy of engagement with China produced great wealth for many companies but failed to spark democratic reform. Qin told us that any ideas of "changing China" were always "an illusion."

He spoke of the upcoming Olympics with pride: "Beijing is ready." These are the second Olympic Games hosted by Beijing, with athletes and others largely living inside a secure "bubble" to protect against coronavirus infection.

A "diplomatic boycott" of the Games by U.S. officials has added tension, though only a few U.S. allies have followed suit, and U.S. athletes will compete. The U.S. announced the boycott in protest of what it terms the "ongoing genocide" of Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim minority in western China. Qin rejected such accusations as "fabrications, lies and disinformation."

He nonetheless asserted that some Uyghurs were terrorists.

"The destination for them is prisons," he said, while asserting that others had inappropriate thoughts that they were being taught to change in "vocational schools."

 

Beijing's diplomatic circumspection on Taiwan is practically an art form, this is the equivalent of plugging in a stack of amps and playing Through The Fire And Flames at max volume.

Just another ball for Biden to juggle.

The Wind For The Willow

The First Family is getting a cat to go along with the dog, so there's some normalcy back in the White House pet count after the last guy again.

 

The Biden family finally has a cat.

First lady Jill Biden's office has announced America's first family is excited to welcome a two-year-old, gray-and-white-striped feline named Willow to the White House.

Biden, a community college professor, named the cat after her hometown of Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, the first lady's spokesperson Michael LaRosa said.

"A farm cat from Pennsylvania, Willow made quite an impression on Dr. Biden in 2020 when she jumped up on the stage and interrupted her remarks during a campaign stop," LaRosa said. "Seeing their immediate bond, the owner of the farm knew that Willow belonged with Dr. Biden."

Dr. Biden had said in April that the family had a female cat "waiting in the wings."

The green-eyed, short-haired tabby cat was settling in well at the White House with "her favorite toys, treats, and plenty of room to smell and explore," LaRosa said.

In December the Bidens welcomed a new dog to the family, a German Shepherd named Commander, who was four months old at the time.

 

Trump didn't have any pets, mainly because 1) he had Rudy already, and 2) animals distrust him because he's, you know, a psychopath.  It's good to see that the Bidens get along with pets.