Beto O'Rourke interrupts the latest Thoughts-n-Prayers circle jerk in Texas.
When you say, "This latest horrific thing came out of the blue, and holy cow whooda thunk it!?!" - when you know this horrific thing that happened today is pretty much exactly the same as the horrific thing that happened yesterday, and the horrific thing that happened the day before that - and you know there's a very high probability that the horrific is going to happen again tomorrow, and the day after that, and and and - when you say that stoopid thing Republicans always fucking say, then you're either paying absolutely no attention to the world around you, or this horrific thing is something you want to happen.
Greg Abbott actually said, "It could've been worse."
That was not just a clumsy fucked up attempt to console anyone.
When a Republican says that, he means it as a threat.
Translation: We can - and will - make it worse if necessary, because it serves our purpose. We create the circumstances for these disasters in order to keep you in your silos - small groups isolated from (and fearful of) "the other" - one group pitted against other groups. We are the ruling minority, so we can't afford to allow you to make common cause against us.
And isn't it interesting that "conservatives" were totally in favor of blowing up town hall meetings in 2010 screaming about the bullshit Death Panels fantasies, but when Beto tries to bring a little reality to the public square - well now, that's just rude, you "sick son of a bitch".
BTW, if you think anything would change if the victims included kids of the typical coin-operated Republican, then you're living in dream world, and maybe somebody should kick you in the stomach until you snap the fuck out of it.
Even if we leave aside the fuckery of their cynical manipulations, these assholes know a good revenue opportunity when they see one. They'd simply notify the NRA that the price of their vote just went up.
Republicans are despicable people and we have to drive them out from among us.
I appreciate your leadership and calm resolve in the face of deep and difficult problems.
And I think your empathy, and your generous heart, and your faith in our shared humanity are genuine and essential to a proper leader of a world power.
But what I need to see from you right now is a clenched fist. I need to see you stomping some NRA ass - and your hands around the throats of their Republican accomplices.
Gunman was bullied as a child, grew increasingly violent, friends say
Relatives, classmates describe fraught relationship with mother and a troubling pattern of acting out
The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said.
Using weapons purchased this month, days after his 18th birthday, authorities said, Salvador Rolando Ramos shot and critically wounded his grandmother. He then went on a shooting rampage at Robb Elementary School near his home in Uvalde, Tex., killing at least 19 children and two adults and injuring others.
Ramos also was fatally shot, apparently by police. The Texas Department of Public Safety said he was wearing body armor and armed with a rifle.
Santos Valdez Jr., 18, said he has known Ramos since early elementary school. They were friends, he said, until Ramos’s behavior started to deteriorate.
They used to play video games such as Fortnite and Call of Duty. But then Ramos changed. Once, Valdez said, Ramos pulled up to a park where they often played basketball and had cuts all over his face. He first said a cat had scratched his face.
“Then he told me the truth, that he’d cut up his face with knives over and over and over,” Valdez said. “I was like, ‘You’re crazy, bro, why would you do that?’”
Ramos said he did it for fun, Valdez recalled.
In middle school and junior high, Ramos was bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, friends and family said.
Stephen Garcia, who considered himself Ramos’s best friend in eighth grade, said Ramos didn’t have it easy in school. “He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,” Garcia said. “Over social media, over gaming, over everything.”
“He was the nicest kid, the most shyest kid. He just needed to break out of his shell.”
One time, he posted a photo of himself wearing black eyeliner, Garcia said, which brought on a slew of comments using a derogatory term for a gay person.
Garcia said he tried to stand up for him. But when Garcia and his mother relocated to another part of Texas for her job, “he just started being a different person,” Garcia said. “He kept getting worse and worse, and I don’t even know.”
When Garcia left, Ramos dropped out of school. He started wearing all black, Garcia said, and large military boots. He grew his hair out long.
He missed long periods of high school, classmates said, and was not on track to graduate with them this year.
Ramos’s cousin Mia said she saw students mock his speech impediment when they attended middle school together. He’d brush it off in the moment, Mia said, then complain later to his grandmother that he didn’t want to go back to school.
“He wasn’t very much of a social person after being bullied for the stutter,” said Mia, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used because her family does not want to be associated with the massacre. “I think he just didn’t feel comfortable anymore at school.”
Valdez said Ramos drove around with another friend at night sometimes and shot at random people with a BB gun. He also egged people’s cars, Valdez said.
About a year ago, Ramos posted on social media photos of automatic rifles that “he would have on his wish list,” Valdez said. Four days ago, he posted images of two rifles he referred to as “my gun pics.”
A person briefed on the investigation’s early findings, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, said Ramos bought the weapon used in the attack immediately after his 18th birthday, which was in mid-May.
Two months ago, he posted an Instagram story in which he screamed at his mother, who he said was trying to kick him out of their home, said Nadia Reyes, a high school classmate.
“He posted videos on his Instagram where the cops were there and he’d call his mom a b---- and say she wanted to kick him out,” Reyes said. “He’d be screaming and talking to his mom really aggressively.”
Ruben Flores, 41, said he lived next door to the family on Hood Street and tried to be a kind of father figure to Ramos, who had “a pretty rough life with his mom.”
He and his wife, Becky Flores, would invite Ramos to barbecues at their house and for sleepovers with their son, who was a few years younger. Ramos went by the nickname “pelon,” Spanish for bald, because his hair was often cut so short when he was younger, Flores said.
As he grew older, problems at home became more acute and more apparent to neighbors, Flores said. He described seeing police at the house and witnessing blowups between Ramos and his mother.
Multiple people familiar with the family, including Flores, said Ramos’s mother used drugs, which contributed to the upheaval in the home. Ramos’s mother could not be reached for comment.
Ramos moved from the Hood Street home to his grandmother’s home across town a few months ago, Flores said. He said he last saw the grandmother on Sunday, when she stopped by the Hood Street property, which she also owned. The grandmother told him she was in the process of evicting Ramos’s mother because of her drug problems, Flores said.
Reyes said she could recall about five times that Ramos had fistfights with peers in middle school and junior high. His friendships were short-lived, she said. Once, Ramos commented to a friend while playing basketball that the friend only wanted to join the Marines one day so he could kill people, Reyes said. The other boy, she added, ended the friendship on the spot.
“He would take things too far, say something that shouldn’t be said, and then he would go into defense mode about it,” Reyes said.
She and her Uvalde High School school classmates had visited Robb Elementary School just a day before the massacre, wearing their graduation robes and high-fiving the grade-schoolers, who lined up in the hallways — a community tradition.
“Those kids were so excited to see us in our cap and gown,” Reyes said. “They’re looking at us like, ‘I’m gonna be there one day.’ It’s surreal, like we’re in a movie. It’s horrible.”
Valdez said his last interaction with Ramos was about two hours before the shooting, when they messaged on Instagram’s Stories feature. Valdez had re-shared a meme that said “WHY TF IS SCHOOL STILL OPEN.”
According to a screenshot of their exchange, Ramos responded: “Facts” and “That’s good tho right?” Then Valdez replied: “Idek [I don’t even know] I don’t even go to school lmao.”
Ramos never responded to or opened that text message, Valdez said.
Just a month or two ago, Garcia said, he called Ramos to check in on him.
But Ramos said he was going hunting with his uncle and didn’t have time to talk. He hung up. Garcia later saw the photos of large guns that Ramos had posted online and wondered whether that was what they were for — going hunting, or to the shooting range with his uncle.
On Tuesday, Garcia was in algebra class in San Antonio when he started receiving a slew of texts with the news of what had happened in Uvalde. He didn’t believe it at first. He opened his phone’s browser and Googled the shooting and saw Ramos’s name.
“I couldn’t even think, I couldn’t even talk to anyone. I just walked out of class, really upset, you know, bawling my eyes out,” Garcia said. “Because I never expected him to hurt people.”
“I think he needed mental help. And more closure with his family. And love.”
Several large corporations that previously condemned the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, including some who pledged not to fund its sympathizers in Congress, have resumed donating to Republican lawmakers who tried to overturn the 2020 election.
That’s according to a report from the corporate watchdog Accountable.US, the same group that previously outed corporations for similar hypocrisy on voting rights. The new report, titled “In Bad Company,” includes Boeing, UPS, FedEx, Cigna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson among a list of companies that claimed to support democracy in public only to quietly continue funding its biggest opponents.
“CEOs were quick to forgive and forget the election objectors’ rhetoric and actions that were a major escalation factor in the lead up to the assault on democracy,” the report says. “The question is, did these companies honestly care about preserving our democracy in the first place?”
The report profiles 20 large corporations and found they “donated over $8.1 million to the 147 members of the Sedition Caucus,” a label given to Republicans who voted against the certification of President Joe Biden's 2020 election win.
Cigna, for example, may have had some people fooled in the wake of the attack. Last year, the insurance giant vowed to stop donating to Republicans who “hindered the transfer of power” on Jan. 6. They went on to donate tens of thousands of dollars to Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 election results.
Duke Energy is another one. After last year’s attack, a spokesperson for the energy giant said the organization was “shocked and dismayed” by the insurrection attempt, and claimed they were “taking this very seriously.” But surprise: The shock and dismay didn’t last long. In 2021, Duke Energy reportedly donated more than $50,000 to Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election.
These donations shouldn’t be interpreted as American industries playing political games as usual. Republicans who objected to certifying the 2020 election did so intent on denying Americans their duly-elected president in favor of a handpicked Republican. Any corporation funneling money to those lawmakers is sponsoring that anti-democratic mission, which hasn’t subsided in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack.
But all of the companies listed in the latest Accountable.US report deserve similar scrutiny now. Their donations equal permission for Republicans to continue their efforts, and these unscrupulous companies will bear responsibility for the attacks on democracy that have happened and will follow — regardless of the statements they release.
As Congress wraps up its long list of business before the end of the year, it couldn’t be clearer that we’re at a turning point—not only for President Joe Biden’s agenda, but also for tens of millions of children and families.
Nearly 90% of U.S. children have benefited from the enhanced child tax credit, passed by Democrats last spring as part of the American Rescue Plan. That credit has meant monthly payments of up to $300 per child going directly into their parents’ bank accounts for essentials like food, housing, school supplies, and diapers. 30% decrease in poverty
The program has been a stunning success. In October 2021, these payments alone kept 3.6 million children out of poverty—decreasing child poverty by nearly 30% compared with October 2020.
Unfortunately, that credit expires this month. Democrats had planned to renew it for a year as part of the Build Back Better Act. But with conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin now joining all 50 Republicans opposing it, it may not be renewed at all. “The tax relief, predictable every month, means that my child has food, a roof, electricity, and heat,” — West Virginia mother Kristen Olsen
The effects of Manchin’s opposition will be devastating: Experts estimate it will plunge up to 10 million kids back into poverty, or even deeper into it. It will strain millions of middle-class families as well—altogether, 65 million children and their families will lose benefits.
Should one multimillionaire senator really get to send millions of children back into poverty?
West Virginia is a poor state
Manchin’s own state would be hard-hit if he does. West Virginia ranks 46th out 50 states with regard to the economic well-being of its children. The enhanced child tax credit has reached 93% of West Virginia’s children, nearly half of whom previously were too poor to receive the full tax credit.
“The tax relief, predictable every month, means that my child has food, a roof, electricity, and heat,” West Virginia mother Kristen Olsen told me. “It means I have less stress and can be a better mother. It means I can stay at my job as an educator because I can afford the child care now.”
But the child tax credit is just the tip of the iceberg. The Democrats’ American Rescue Plan also expanded the earned income tax credit, which helps another 100,000 low-income workers in West Virginia who aren’t raising kids. It too will expire without Manchin’s vote for the Build Back Better Act.
Paid family and sick leaves is another highly popular provision that Manchin’s threatened “no” vote will kill. This provision would provide millions of workers four weeks of paid leave to take care of themselves or a family member if they fall ill. Currently, less than 10% of low-income workers receive any kind of paid leave.
Manchin says he’s worried passing the Build Back Better Act now would speed up inflation. But 17 Nobel-winning economists have testified that it wouldn’t.
Combat inflation
On the contrary, the bill will help millions of families afford rising prices at the pump, at the grocery store, and for home heating. And the bill’s other provisions—like making sure most families won’t pay more than 7% of their income on child care, defraying the costs of care for elderly or disabled loved ones, and capping the cost of insulin and prescription drugs for seniors—will all combat inflation.
Not only are all of these provisions paid for, according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, but the revenue raisers in the Build Back Better Act would actually lower the deficit in the long run, too. These revenues come only from taxpayers who are multimillionaires—like Manchin and his donors.
In fact, Manchin himself helped kill additional revenue raisers that would have fairly taxed the ultrarich, like the very popular billionaires tax, which alone would have raised over $550 billion. And just this December, Manchin had no problem voting for the massive $778 billion military- spending bill—which is four times larger than the annual cost of the Build Back Better proposal.
Grassroots movements like The Poor People’s Campaign, led by the Rev. Drs. William Barber II and Liz Theoharis, have been demonstrating outside Manchin’s offices in Washington and West Virginia. Their rallying cry was the old Pete Seeger song, “Which Side Are You On?”
If Manchin sticks with his “no” vote, he’ll have answered that question clearly—and hung millions of struggling families out to dry.
Common Dreams: (very "leftie", but good record on accuracy and sourcing)
Manchin Has Received $1.5 Million From Corporate Interests Attacking Biden Agenda
Report Large corporations "have given Senator Manchin over a million reasons to avoid paying their fair share," said Accountable.US president Kyle Herrig.
Sen. Joe Manchin, one of a handful of Democratic lawmakers threatening to tank President Joe Biden's legislative agenda, has received at least $1.5 million in campaign donations from the businesses and trade groups leading corporate America's lobbying blitz against the Build Back Better reconciliation package, a new analysis by Accountable.US reveals.
The watchdog group's report, provided exclusively to Common Dreams, shows that corporate powerhouses including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the highest-spending lobbying firm in the U.S—and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America have donated a combined $1,525,700 to Manchin (D-W.Va.), a key swing vote who is currently working to lop as much as $2 trillion off his own party's popular legislation.
"Senator Manchin knows big corporations managed to make billion-dollar profits despite the pandemic as everyday families fell further behind," Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, told Common Dreams. "Manchin now has a golden opportunity to level the playing field for working people by backing investments and tax relief aimed at them for a change—investments that will lower health and childcare costs for most in West Virginia."
"Rich corporations may have given Senator Manchin over a million reasons to avoid paying their fair share—but is it all worth it if he has nothing to show for the families he actually represents?" Herrig asked.
The Chamber of Commerce—whose members include such corporate behemoths as ExxonMobil, Pfizer, and Facebook—has promised to do "everything in [its] power to ensure" the reconciliation bill fails. Earlier this year, the lobbying group said it would financially reward Manchin after he voiced opposition to some of Biden's domestic policy initiatives.
According to Accountable.US, the Chamber's political action committee has given Manchin $10,000 since 2011. Big corporations on the business organization's leadership boards—including Shell Oil, Microsoft, and Honeywell—have donated a total of $565,700 to Manchin through their political arms, the watchdog group found.
Accountable's report also spotlights campaign cash the West Virginia Democrat has received from the Business Roundtable—"whose board is stocked with CEOs from 12 corporations that have given $245,500 to Sen. Manchin"—and the National Association of Manufacturers, "which gave $7,500 to Manchin as its leading corporate members gave him $487,000."
While Manchin has publicly been cagey about what specific programs he wants to cut from the emerging reconciliation package, recent news reports have indicated that the senator—a major ally of the fossil fuel and a coal profiteer—opposes some of Democrats' green-energy proposals, Medicare expansion, and other elements of the sprawling reconciliation plan, despite their popularity in West Virginia and across the nation.
Last week, Axios reported that Manchin has been "telling colleagues that progressives need to pick just one of President Biden's three signature policies for helping working families"—the expanded child tax credit, paid family leave, or child care subsidies—"and discard the other two," an approach that progressives quickly rejected as a non-starter.
"Responsible governing isn't about pitting women, children, and families against each other," said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.). "We have the resources to uplift everyone and leave no one behind. It's absurd to say that we don't."
And we (ie: people who want the Dems to get with the fuckin' program) have a problem too.
We can and should pressure Manchin and Sinema to support the big things progressives are trying to do, while also understanding that all they have to do to thwart our efforts is hint that if we get too pushy, they just might have to cross the aisle and join with the other gang - at least for a while.
And of course, that's kinda what's happening now anyway, so we're back to reading tea leaves and trying to sleuth out the sausage-making process at any given moment.
It's annoying and frustrating and I'm real sick of feeling like we're constantly at the edge of the abyss, balanced on the knife's edge, waiting for an announcement that the apocalypse is here now and we're all gonna fucking die because the shit's gonna hit the fan no matter which way we decide to go.
We should be doing a lot better than this. After 15,000 years of bloodshed and conquest and superstitious paranoia, we should be living our lives in a civilized world of genial accommodation among people of good faith and common reason.
Don't try to turn an economic philosophy into a system of government
Never make it dependent on changing human nature
That said, we have to figure out how to put honor back up at the top of the heap. And I promise, the concept of expecting everybody to behave in an honorable way does not run contrary to #3 above.
I guess we have to start by re-acquainting ourselves with the concept of honor, and acknowledging that everything we do is, in fact, in the end, "on the honor system".
I can sign a contract or swear an oath, but when it comes time for me to deliver on the promises I made - in writing or otherwise - I can choose not to honor my word.
You can sue me. I can countersue. Maybe we settle. Maybe it goes all the way through the courts, bankrupting both of us.
The whole thing breaks down and loses its meaning if anyone decides at any time to act dishonorably along the way - which includes the people who are sworn to administer and uphold the law.
We've evolved a sense of honor (morality, ethics, law) because we know that's how it has to be in order to make a partnership work; to make a family work; to make a clan work; to make a tribe work; to make a neighborhood work - to make everything work that has anything to do with a world where there's more than one person involved.
Learn to live your life without needing a cop or Jesus or your mom looking over your shoulder the whole time.
As Virus Spread, Reports of Trump Administration’s Private Briefings Fueled Sell-Off
On the afternoon of Feb. 24, President Trump declared on Twitter that the coronavirus was “very much under control” in the United States, one of numerous rosy statements that he and his advisers made at the time about the worsening epidemic. He even added an observation for investors: “Stock market starting to look very good to me!”
But hours earlier, senior members of the president’s economic team, privately addressing board members of the conservative Hoover Institution, were less confident. Tomas J. Philipson, a senior economic adviser to the president, told the group he could not yet estimate the effects of the virus on the American economy. To some in the group, the implication was that an outbreak could prove worse than Mr. Philipson and other Trump administration advisers were signaling in public at the time.
The next day, board members — many of them Republican donors — got another taste of government uncertainty from Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council. Hours after he had boasted on CNBC that the virus was contained in the United States and “it’s pretty close to airtight,” Mr. Kudlow delivered a more ambiguous private message. He asserted that the virus was “contained in the U.S., to date, but now we just don’t know,” according to a document describing the sessions obtained by The New York Times.
The document, written by a hedge fund consultant who attended the three-day gathering of Hoover’s board, was stark. “What struck me,” the consultant wrote, was that nearly every official he heard from raised the virus “as a point of concern, totally unprovoked.”
The consultant’s assessment quickly spread through parts of the investment world. U.S. stocks were already spiraling because of a warning from a federal public health official that the virus was likely to spread, but traders spotted the immediate significance: The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.
Interviews with eight people who either received copies of the memo or were briefed on aspects of it as it spread among investors in New York and elsewhere provide a glimpse of how elite traders had access to information from the administration that helped them gain financial advantage during a chaotic three days when global markets were teetering.
The piece goes on to chronicle the assholery of (mostly) GOP politicians and their sugar-daddy donors, and it makes my blood boil.
The one thing that makes the economy run is people having a fairly high level of confidence that they're not going to be ripped off every time they turn around.
The one thing that makes a democracy work is people having a fairly high level of confidence that their votes count, and that a government of, by, and for the people isn't just a nice-sounding rhetorical flourish, but actually bears some resemblance to a government of, by, and for the fucking people.
When "justice" becomes selective, and depends on your level of affluence, because that makes it possible for you to buy influence over the justice system itself, then it's a pretty short road to the collapse of the whole mess.
Don't get me started on the near-perfect parallel between what we've got going here in USAmerica Inc and full blown Daddy State fascism. We are teetering on the brink of the event horizon.
Ya gotta know something's wrong when a candidate for POTUS has to raise close to a billion dollars to land a job that pays $400k a year. That's pretty fucked up right there.
There's this thing we call "compromise". In the late 1780s, as the framers were in the process of pushing the US constitution towards ratification, one of the main criticisms was: "It's a bundle of comprise". A lot of people were unhappy because they wouldn't be getting their way on their favorite issues. We don't need to wonder why there's a tendency for the kind of bullheaded tribal devotion to one side or the other in politics. It's embedded in the human firmware. The point of the American Experiment was (is) to elevate compromise; to make compromise itself - and thus the ability to reach a positive outcome through compromise - a worthy and admirable alternative to bashing each other over the head with sticks and rocks. There can be no more representative issue to illustrate that point than the Gun Debate.
Look at any given comments section online where the topic is Guns and Gun Control and 2nd amendment and dead kids etc etc. I've lost count of the times I could easily draw the inference that a commenter intended to back up his position with violence in order to prove his point - or his manhood, or some other fucked up thing rattling around in his vacuum-packed skull.
Weirdly, "conservatives" have it right - we've got a serious cultural problem. But the roots of that problem have very little to do with video games or hip-hop or lack of prayer or any of the other bugbears the right radicals love to pimp at us. Those are all reflections of our culture - they're symptoms, not causes. I won't try to lay the blame at the feet of the US military (fake lord knows it's a whole fucktangle of weird shit), but think about the simple fact that we've got millions of kids who have grown up never knowing a single day in their entire lives when the US wasn't at war. Now look at the cops they've grown accustomed to seeing.
And their dads, brothers, uncles, cousins and neighbors.
We've all but abandoned 'soft power', and made the decision to leave everything up to the military and the cops. We send troops in to handle whatever we think is wrong in foreign countries, and we call the cops every time we think there might be a problem with somebody in the park or the grocery store or down the block from us. We've come to fully expect that whatever the problem is, we can simply kill our way out of it. WaPo - Howell Raines
September 1, 2019
As a hunter who has owned firearms since adolescence without breaking any laws or feeling under-gunned, I think I am equipped to offer a modest proposal that could produce a safer America and also break the maniacal hold of the National Rifle Association on the nation’s recreational shooters, not to mention Congress.
My proposal is simply that we revert to the gun laws that prevailed in the United States around 1960. From a public-safety standpoint, that was far from a perfect world. The cheap revolvers called “Saturday night specials” ruled the night in many cities. Loopholes as to the sale and registration of long arms allowed the importation of the mail-order rifle that Lee Harvey Oswald used to kill President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Yet law-abiding hunters and target shooters had all the weapons and firepower they needed and were not in a state of constant turmoil over state and federal laws that restricted most shotguns to three rounds and most semiautomatic rifles and handguns to fewer than 20 rounds. American gun and ammunition manufacturers such as Remington, Winchester and Colt were thriving. Nobody argued that a six-shot revolver was inadequate for home-protection emergencies. Deer and elk hunters who used larger caliber rifles felt amply equipped with standard magazines of a half-dozen or so shells. A return to these basic restrictions on loadings would appeal to most hunters, firing-range shooters and gun collectors who battle the nonstop whirlpool of NRA paranoia. It would give members of Congress, including those from rural, pro-gun states, a sellable policy with a history of limiting mass shootings in public places while protecting the sporting and self-protection practices of law-abiding citizens. And it would reduce the body count from shootings in public places.
I'm not saying we should yearn for some romantic fantasy of the pastoral days of yore. But I insist that we look at what was working for us before we removed all restraints and allowed private interests to install wholly owned coin-operated politicians in such openly crass ways.
This ends in plutocracy, which in turn eventually ends in bloody revolt - just exactly the way it did in 18th-century America.
The Plutocracy Project is out in the open. Purpose-built store-bought coin-operated politicians.
Our little experiment in self-government is dying, and unless we pull off a miracle comeback in 2020, we're just arguing over who will get to do what with the corpse. https://t.co/owCRWix2yK
American Association For The Advancement Of Science: Counter to a lot of public opinion, having a mental illness does not necessarily make a person more likely to commit gun violence. According to a new study, a better indicator of gun violence was access to firearms.
A study by researchers at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston looked into the association between gun violence and mental health in a group of 663 young adults in Texas. Their results were published in the journal Preventive Medicine.
"Counter to public beliefs, the majority of mental health symptoms examined were not related to gun violence," said Dr. Yu Lu, a postdoctoral research fellow at UTMB and the lead author of the study.
What researchers found instead was that individuals who had gun access were approximately 18 times more likely to have threatened someone with a gun. Individuals with high hostility were about 3.5 times more likely to threaten someone.
"These findings have important implications for gun control policy efforts," Lu said.
Each year, an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 Americans are injured by firearms and 30,000 to 40,000 die from firearms, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
"Much of the limited research on gun violence and mental illness has focused on violence among individuals with severe mental illnesses or rates of mental illness among individuals arrested for violent crimes," Lu said. "What we found is that the link between mental illness and gun violence is not there."
For nearly an entire generation, Republicans have blocked most of the funding CDC needs in order to study gun violence. In some states, they've made it illegal for doctors to ask if there's a gun in the home when examining patients who present with (eg) Depression or possible Domestic Abuse injuries.
One of the many shitty things that have come out of Bob Mueller's investigation of the 2016 election is the near-certainty that Russian money was (maybe still is) being laundered through the NRA and injected into (mostly) Republican campaign coffers. So among the 3 or 4 "absolute top priority items" on the To-Do list is fixing that incredibly stoopid Citizens United thing. There's no limit on the amount of money you can spend supporting a particular candidate (or an issue that the candidate can stand in front of and claim as his own). As long as that regime is in place, we have a de facto Plutocracy, which makes it harder not to think the republic is already dead, and we're just arguing over who gets to do what with the corpse.
About 1,700 decks of cards have been delivered to the office of a Washington state senator who said nurses "probably play cards for a considerable amount of the day," the senator said in a statement Wednesday.
Republican state Sen. Maureen Walsh apologized on Monday after facing a backlash for comments she made debating a bill, HB 1155, that would provide uninterrupted meal and rest breaks and mandatory overtime for nurses and certain health care employees. Walsh said last Tuesday on the senate floor, "By putting these types of mandates on a critical access hospital that literally serves a handful of individuals, I would submit to you those nurses probably do get breaks. They probably play cards for a considerable amount of the day."
An open letter posted by Facebook user Shy Braaten called for people to send a deck of cards to the senator, and included her PO Box. The letter reads, "I don't know any nurses who play cards, Senator Walsh. I know nurses who care for babies who were born with their spines on the outside of their bodies and brains that won't stop bleeding. I know nurses who hold infants that can't stop crying because they were born addicted to heroin and methamphetamines."
The letter is signed, "One of the millions of people who love a nurse."
Walsh issued a lengthy statement on Monday apologizing and said, "I was tired, and in the heat of argument on the Senate floor, I said some things about nurses that were taken out of context -- but still they crossed the line."
Gotta love the bullshit these "conservative" assholes are always willing to shovel when they issue the non-apology-apology for having said things that reveal what they really think: "...taken out of context..." - and - "...in the heat of the moment..."
If we check her donor list, do you suppose we might find a check from the hospital business group that stands to lose leverage over their nursing staff if things change a bit?
Maureen Walsh is too fucking typical of the system of Coin-Operated Politicians that we're allowing to kill our democracy.
The Houston Chronicle reports that Tillerson opened up about his working relationship with Trump during a public appearance in Houston on Thursday evening.
In particular, Tillerson said that the president quickly grew tired of hearing that he couldn’t take certain actions because they would be illegal.
“So often, the president would say, ‘Here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it,'” Tillerson explained. “And I would have to say to him, ‘Mr. President I understand what you want to do but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law.'”
Tillerson said that he advised Trump to lobby Congress to change certain laws if they interfered with what he wanted to do, but the president mostly just got angry with him.
Two things here
Tillerson confirms the worst-kept secret ever: This is a Pay-To-Play system, and all you really need is to find a Coin-Operated Politician who can get legislation passed that allows you to do the shitty thing you want to do.
Things are pretty fucking bad when Rex Tillerson is your moral compass.
Jamie Ross, The Daily Beast: Arron Banks, the biggest individual donor in British political history and a major source of money behind the Brexit campaign, has been placed under criminal investigation for several suspected offenses that took place during the referendum.
Britain’s election watchdog says there are “reasonable grounds” to suspect that Banks committed several crimes in the run-up to the dramatic vote, and that they suspect he wasn’t the true source of £8 million ($10 million) in loans made to Better for the Country—a company he used to finance the Leave.EU campaign group whose public face was Nigel Farage.
The investigation by the National Crime Agency, which has the expertise to trace illicit cross-border money trails, will seek to find the true source of the money that funded Brexit.
Banks—one of the self-christened “bad boys of Brexit” who met Donald Trump in late 2016 with Farage—has long been a controversial figure with business links to Russia. He is known to have been offered three Russian business deals during the Brexit campaign, including one that gave him the chance to make huge profits from a Russian gold company.
Too much money in politics. We have to get back to a decent level of transparency - where we can learn every name associated with every dollar "donated" to every political entity. A coin-operated political system is inherently corrupt.
First, I'd like to remind everybody of this one thing: in 2012 the NC legislature passed a resolution barring state institutions and agencies from using any reports on radical ideas like AGW and Climate Change and Sea Level Rise as they updated their plans for Emergency Response.
Let's just let that one marinate for a bit.
From Lumberton - a quiet little town about 70 miles inland from Wilmington - WaPo's Sarah Kaplan has a story about people caught in the massive ongoing fuckup that is the emerging American Plutocracy: Paddling through the swamp that was once her front yard Tuesday morning, Megan Curry saw this waterlogged community through the eyes of someone who had lived there all her life. That trash-strewn waterway was really a paved road. Those submerged shingles were the roof of the shed that held Curry’s childhood Christmas ornaments. And this sodden structure — with its walls buckling, its stairs crumbling, its floorboards detached from the foundation and floating in a foot of water — this was home. It was the house her grandfather built, on land her great-great-grandparents cleared, the house her family had finished repairing just 11 months ago in the wake of Hurricane Matthew. But out there was the Lumber River, normally so distant it’s not even visible through the trees, now sloshing into her living room for the second time in as many years. All Curry could think was, “Again.” It had happened again. When it inundated North Carolina in 2016, meteorologists called Hurricane Matthew a “500-year rain event,” the kind of downpour that was likely to occur once every half-millennium. But then, just two years later, here came Florence, a “1,000-year event” that hit all the same places in all the same ways, if not harder. “This can’t keep happening to us,” said Charles Gregory Cummings, mayor of Pembroke, 10 miles upriver from Lumberton. “We know what to do, but we need help.”
Hurricane Harvey, which inundated the Houston area with up to 60 inches of rain last August, was one of the most outlandish storms ever to hit the U.S. Ironically, it crossed a Gulf of Mexico that had been calm for days and quickly quieted again afterward. This rare situation allowed scientists to obtain unusually specific data about the ocean before and after the hurricane, and about the storm’s energy and moisture.
Last week researchers published that data in Earth’s Future. The numbers indicate the amount of energy Harvey pulled from the ocean, in the form of rising water vapor, equaled the amount of energy it dropped over land in the form of rain—the first time such an equivalence has been documented. Investigators say this revelation supports assertions climate change is likely to make Atlantic hurricanes bigger, more intense and longer-lasting than in the past. The researchers calculate climate change caused Harvey’s rainfall to be 15 to 38 percent greater than it would have been otherwise.
It gets worse until we get together and start demanding better service from Coin-Operated Politicians.
There is such a thing as a Reasonable Republican - honest there is. I know it's a little jarring these days to think those two words could be contained in the same thought without causing real damage to your brain, but some Repubs really are pretty reasonable. Or rather they were pretty reasonable until they started to realize how fucked they're going to be as we find out that a good bit of the blood money they've collected as campaign contributions over the last several years has been coming from Russian oligarchs and laundered thru the NRA. Vanity Fair: The F.B.I. and special counsel Robert Mueller are investigating meetings between N.R.A. officials and powerful Russian operatives, trying to determine if those contacts had anything to do with the gun group spending $30 million to help elect Donald Trump—triple what it invested on behalf of Mitt Romney in 2012. The use of foreign money in American political campaigns is illegal. One encounter of particular interest to investigators is between Donald Trump Jr.and a Russian banker at an N.R.A. dinner.
The Russian wooing of N.R.A. executives goes back to at least 2011, when that same banker and politician, Alexander Torshin, befriended David Keene,who was then president of the gun-rights organization. Torshin soon became a “life member,” attending the N.R.A.’s annual conventions and introducing comrades to other gun-group officials. In 2015, Torshin welcomed an N.R.A. delegation to Moscow that included Keene and Joe Gregory, then head of the “Ring of Freedom” program, which is reserved for top donors to the N.R.A. Among the other hosts were Dmitry Rogozin, who until last month was the deputy prime minister overseeing Russia’s defense industry, and Sergei Rudov,head of the Saint Basil the Great Charitable Foundation, one of Russia’s wealthiest philanthropies.
It’s possible that the men were merely bonding over a shared love of firearms. Mike Carpenter, a Russian specialist who worked in the Pentagon during the Obama administration, laughs at the notion. “The Russian state is run by a K.G.B. elite that wants nothing less than to have an armed citizenry,” Carpenter says. “Rogozin is a heavyweight in Russian politics. . . . Torshin has a direct line to Putin . . . and also has possible ties to organized crime. Rudov is the right-hand man of Konstantin Malofeev, who is sort of a paleo-conservative, ultra-nationalist figure who bankrolls a lot of projects involving mercenaries in Ukraine.” Carpenter sees how a dark money trail could connect the Kremlin to the gun lobby. “Those three would only meet with N.R.A. officials if there were some concerted effort by senior members of the Russian government to try and co-opt the N.R.A. politically,” he continues. “And they are all money men. They can throw tens of millions around.” (Efforts to reach Torshin, Rogozin, Rudov, and Malofeev were unsuccessful. Malofeev has denied aiding the invasion of Ukraine.)
There are some very nervous politicians in Washington.
If there was ever a time to get serious about turning Citizens United upside down, this is it.
