Independent News

This post was originally published on this site

It hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for Donald Trump. First, Republicans scored a splashy win in the Virginia gubernatorial contest with a candidate who mostly stiff-armed Trump publicly.

Next, President Joe Biden accomplished in nine months what eluded Trump for four solid years. Even worse, the trillion-dollar plan—similar to one Trump floated in March 2020 but didn’t have the skill to deliver—also garnered solid bipartisan support in both the Senate and the House.

Biden’s success entirely destroyed Trump’s ridiculous claim to being a master dealmaker. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has recently caved to Trump on other critical issues, surely felt a hint of glee when he declared the Biden bill “a godsend for Kentucky.”

Overall, Trump still dominates the Republican Party and appears poised to continue snuffing out its more moderate, establishment elements in next year’s midterms. But not everyone is bending to Trump’s will, and if there’s anything Trump craves, it’s 100% fealty from everyone at all times. So in that sense, these last couple weeks have been filled with disappointment.

Beyond Virginia and the bipartisan blow Trump suffered with Build Back Better, Trump’s once subservient mini-me 2024 hopeful is taking on a slightly more subversive demeanor.

Politico reports that Trump has been bending the ear of any Mar-a-Lago guest who will listen about the failure of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to publicly say he’ll defer to Trump if the twice-impeached two-time popular vote loser declares his candidacy.

In the world according to Trump, DeSantis has privately reassured the great orange one that he will stand down if Trump wishes to run. But Trump doesn’t just want private fealty, he wants public fealty. In the meantime, Trump is watching DeSantis avidly fundraise for a potential ’24 bid, and he’s not super excited about former aides like Mark Meadows sometimes joining DeSantis at high-profile events, such as a Beverly Hills fundraiser in June. And the more the star of DeSantis rises, the sooner Trump will try to orchestrate a takedown.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted to convict Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, also stuck it to Trump Friday with her announcement that she’s running for reelection next year.

Trump endorsed Republican Kelly Tshibaka in June to primary Murkowski, but that clearly hasn’t scared off the three-term senator. Murkowski survived a 2010 reelection scare by mounting a write-in campaign after she was defeated in the GOP primary. Her announcement sets up a showdown between Trump, who won the state by 10 points in 2020, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which has committed to backing Murkowski.

Finally, on his way out the Senate door, longtime Alabama lawmaker Richard Shelby is hoping to cripple Trump’s endorsement of Rep. Mo “Body Armor” Brooks to be Shelby’s replacement. Instead, Shelby reportedly plans to boost the candidacy of his former chief of staff, 39-year-old Katie Britt, by gifting $5 million from his campaign funds to an independent super PAC supporting Britt.

“The Senator’s support for Katie is well known,” a Shelby spokesperson said in a statement. “He will continue to back her as the race develops in whatever ways are most appropriate, as he believes she is the best candidate to serve the people of Alabama.”

Brooks fired back by calling Shelby the epitome of the “establishment, never-Trump, RINO, special-interest group wing of the Republican Party.”

This post was originally published on this site

Although anti-Asian hate crimes are no longer a topic of interest in the media, that doesn’t mean they have come to an end. Since the pandemic started, crimes against the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) have been reported daily. Between 2019 to 2020 alone, the U.S. had seen a 76% rise in crimes targetting AAPI community members.

While many of these crimes target the elderly and often go unreported, one’s profession and age do not deter them from being a victim.  In a recent hate crime that has made headlines, Olympian gold gymnast Sunisa (Suni) Lee said she was attacked with pepper spray in Los Angeles. Lee became famous when she brought home not one but three medals, including one gold, after the 2020 Olympics. The 18-year-old made history as the first Asian American to bring home a gold medal in the all-around gymnastics competition.

In an interview with PopSugar, she shared that she and a group of friends, all of Asian descent, were waiting for an Uber in Los Angeles when a car drove by and shouted at the group. Amongst racial slurs, the people inside the vehicle allegedly called for the group to “go back to where [they] came from.” One person even pepper-sprayed Lee on her arm before the car drove away.

“I was so mad, but there was nothing I could do or control because they skirted off,” Lee told PopSugar. “I didn’t do anything to them, and having the reputation, it’s so hard because I didn’t want to do anything that could get me into trouble. I just let it happen.”

After the incident, Lee said she called Jess Graba, her gymnastics trainer and owner of Midwest Gymnastics, and he flew out to Los Angeles to be with her. The gymnast confirmed to CNN that the incident happened in October when she was in Los Angeles to film “Dancing with the Stars.”

The attack comes amid a rise in attacks on Asian Americans across the country. Data from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino has found that hate crimes against Asian Americans surged in 2020 in at least 15 cities, Daily Kos reported. As the data was further reviewed, reports indicated that crimes against Asian Americans rose by 169% when comparing the first quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021. 

Additionally, California-based nonprofit Stop AAPI Hate found that hate crimes against the AAPI community nearly doubled in March 2021. The organization received a total of more than 9,000 such reports from March 2020 to June 2021. Most incidents were connected to the spread of COVID-19 misinformation and the Trump administration’s use of xenophobic language like “Chinese virus,” “Wuhan virus,” and “Kung Flu.” As people were forced to stay at home due to safety measures in place, they took their frustration out on the AAPI community, who they blamed for the virus, a report found according to Daily Kos.

Unfortunately, while Lee was able to speak up and report the crime, many hate crimes go unreported, which is why advocates believe the numbers of victims must be higher than reported.

“When you have someone who is as prominent and beloved as an Olympic medalist feeling hesitancy with reporting, can you imagine what someone who does not have her prominence may feel?” Brian Levin, who runs the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, told The Washington Post.

The type of attack Lee faced is more common than others, data by Stop AAPI Hate confirmed. Lee is also not the first Olympian to be a victim of a hate crime. According to NBC News, Japanese American U.S. karate Olympian Sakura Kokuma was harassed in April when a man shouted racial slurs and threatened her. While bystanders were present, no one came to her aid during the incident.

The AAPI community needs our support now more than ever, whether it be checking in on our family and friends, spreading awareness of COVID-19 misconceptions, or contacting members of Congress to do more against anti-Asian hate. Check out this guide on resources and ways to support the AAPI community and our Asian friends. Hate is the real virus, and we must end it.

This post was originally published on this site

This week, the White House informed states that President Joe Biden has approved an extension of Federal Emergency Management Agency COVID-19 relief until April 1, 2022. That means all state, local, and tribal governments will continue to get 100% reimbursements for efforts to continue to combat the pandemic, like vaccination clinics and public campaigns to encourage people to get the shots. The extension includes 100% federal reimbursement for national guard troops who have been deployed to help hospitals still overwhelmed by coronavirus patients.

There are still states in that position. The entire state of Idaho has been under a crisis standard of care declaration since September 16, 2021. That provides guidelines to “help healthcare providers and systems decide how to deliver the best care possible under the extraordinary circumstances of an overwhelming disaster or public health emergency. The guidelines are used when there are not enough healthcare resources to provide the usual standard of care to people who need it.” About 20 of Alaska’s hospitals have authorization in place to activate those standards if necessary. Colorado has had to reactivate the standards, and the two largest hospitals in Albuquerque, New Mexico, had to activate the standards Thursday.

If the public health crisis isn’t over, the economic crisis can’t end. While much of the nation is returning to some kind of normal, that just can’t happen while other big chunks of it are still in crisis. The White House does recognize that, and that’s a big part of why President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan exists.

At this rate, with Sen. Joe Manchin playing his delay game, that plan could be delayed for weeks and weeks, if not months. Manchin apparently believes that Congress should instead be focusing on the looming debt ceiling and government funding deadlines. He’s not concerned enough about those things to consider ending the filibuster so that Democrats can easily deal with these issues on their own, however.

So given that the pandemic is still with us, and that millions of people are still struggling, some form of pandemic assistance needs to continue to flow to people. “Nearly 20 million adults—9 percent of all adults in the country—reported that their household sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat in the last seven days, according to Household Pulse Survey data collected September 29–October 11,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports.

“When asked why, 82 percent said they ‘couldn’t afford to buy more food,’ rather than (or in addition to) non-financial factors such as lack of transportation or safety concerns due to the pandemic.” Additionally, “12 million adults living in rental housing—16 percent of adult renters—were not caught up on rent, according to data collected September 29–October 1.”

In addition, rising heating fuel costs and the complex economic factors created by the pandemic mean rising food costs aren’t likely to resolve quickly. So with those two must-pass things coming up, debt ceiling and government funding, there needs to be something in it for people. If nothing else, the monthly Child Tax Credit extension payments need to be included. Those are set to end as monthly payments in December.

Another option would be a fourth stimulus check, a solution Democrats have been talking about for months, but thus far haven’t worked to make actually happen. The Senior Citizens League has been rallying for $1,400 checks for Social Security recipients. “Social Security benefits only raised by 1.3 percent—on average that’s $20. That really eroded the buying power people had even just 12 months ago,” Mary Johnson, the group’s Social Security and Medicare policy analyst, told Newsweek. “We thought a one-time stimulus payment would help heat homes right now.”

It would, but the population that needs it is larger. If Build Back Better—and the myriad programs included in it—isn’t going to pass, something is going to have to for millions of Americans facing a long, cold, hungry winter.

This post was originally published on this site

Lonnie Coffman toted guns and hauled a cache of weapons and Molotov cocktails to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 and on Friday, at a court in the nation’s capital, he pleaded guilty to two criminal charges that prosecutors, if they wished to hit him with the max sentence, could earn him up to 15 years in prison.

The 71-year-old of Falkville, Alabama was indicted on Jan. 11 and was the first person tied to the siege to be charged. Coffman, a U.S. Army veteran who served multiple tours in Vietnam, was arrested on Jan. 6 after he was stopped by police near the Capitol.

Coffman had parked his red GMC Sierra inside an area cordoned off by law enforcement just near the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee buildings. A pipe bomb was suspected to have been dropped off in the area and police had cleared the zone. That suspect is still at large.

In the process of clearing the area, one officer noticed Coffman’s truck and upon peering inside, spotted a gun on the passenger seat, according to a criminal affidavit filed on Jan. 7.

A U.S. Capitol Police bomb squad was called in to inspect the truck and officers quickly turned up a loaded 9mm handgun, a rifle, a semi-automatic shotgun, a number of large capacity ammunition feeding devices with over 10 rounds of rifle ammunition, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, machetes, a stun gun, smoke bombs and no less than 11 Molotov cocktails.

Since his arrest—when officers also found on his person a 9mm handgun and a .22-caliber revolver—Coffman has been held at the D.C. jail on pretrial detention.

On Friday, during a remote plea hearing at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Coffman entered two guilty pleas; one plea was for the Molotov cocktails and the other was for carrying a pistol without a license.

Though he was originally charged with 17 counts, all of which were related to the weapons stowed in his truck —he was not charged with entering the Capitol or rioting—Coffman negotiated a plea deal earlier this year. To drop several of the counts, he offered authorities access to his social media accounts and like many other defendants related to the insurrection at the Capitol, he agreed to be interviewed about Jan. 6 ahead of sentencing.

According to NBC4 reporter Scott MacFarlane, who covered the plea hearing Friday, Coffman at one point attempted to argue that the Molotovs found in his car were defective due to age. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, appointed by former President Bill Clinton, informed Coffman she would not accept his plea deal if he tried to play down or deny the charge.

MacFarlane noted Friday that during this exchange with Kollar-Kotelly, when the judge asked whether Coffman put gasoline, a lighter and rags in the 11 mason jars before he came to Washington, Coffman said yes but he “didn’t plan any action with those things.”  

Coffman maintained he whipped them up long before his travels to D.C. but Kollar-Kotelly was persistent Friday afternoon since a part of the 71-year-old’s plea deal involves admitting to having the Molotovs in his car. Coffman finally conceded Friday that he knew the devices were illegal and that he was carrying, illegally, two unregistered guns on Capitol Hill.

The maximum sentence for the Molotov cocktails is 10 years and for the guns, five years but the estimated sentencing range for the guns is about six to 24 months in prison while the Molotovs feature an estimated guideline for sentencing at about 37 to 46 months.

Notably, in addition to the small armory Coffman hauled around in his truck, law enforcement also turned up a disturbing handwritten note authored by the Alabama man that listed a quote believed to have been uttered by President Abraham Lincoln.

“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who would pervert the Constitution,” the scrawled citation read.

Coffman also listed the name of Rep. Andre Carson, an Indiana Democrat and noted, in parentheses, that Carson is Muslim. Coffman also rattled off a series of conservative political pundits on his list and included contact information.  Senator Ted Cruz also appeared on the note as well as Judge David Hamilton of Indiana’s 7th circuit. Coffman had listed Hamilton explicitly as a “bad guy.”

Coffman is expected to be sentenced in April and will be held without bond until that time.

This post was originally published on this site

It’s not news that Facebook is a key organizing tool for angry conservatives, but the scope of it is still dizzying. Media Matters has identified “at least 860 right-wing parents and school-related groups that are active, with at least 717,000 combined members,” with topics ranging from “critical race theory” (read: any teaching that could be interpreted as anti-racist) to mask and vaccine mandates to the whole cocktail of right-wing positions on schools.

The 860 groups Media Matters found include six networks with anywhere from 23 to 135 groups each, many of them private. When you’ve got networks running dozens of groups apiece, that’s a sign that something is going on beyond an organic uprising of frustrated parents. It’s not the first sign of that, of course, with other little hints including the Fox News full-court press to create school-related culture wars, statements from Republican politicians doing the same, Glenn Youngkin’s entire campaign for governor in Virginia, and books being pulled from school libraries around the country.

But the Facebook groups help show how the organized, top-down right-wing campaign reaches hundreds of thousands of people and mobilizes them to show up at school board meetings to yell and scream or complain about books in school libraries. Media Matters found:

• 125 anti-mask groups.
• 116 groups opposing critical race theory.
• 34 anti-vaccine groups.
• 21 groups opposing vaccine mandates.
• 17 groups opposing comprehensive sex education.
• 13 groups that were focused on reopening schools.

While those may be the organizing principles of the groups, there’s a lot of crossover. Media Matters found numerous cases of anti-mask, anti-vaccine, and anti-sex ed posts on Parents Against Critical Race Theory, for instance, as well as anti-CRT posts in groups officially dedicated to opposition to masks or vaccines.

For Republicans, these issues are connected to a broader attack on public schools as a public good. It’s not just about masks or vaccines, or anti-racism. It’s not even just about getting Republican voters worked up about those things, using the culture war angle to get them to the polls. It’s about saying that public schools should be subservient to the whims of individual parents rather than serving all children equally. That there should not be a baseline of safe, healthy education that all kids have access to, but rather a fragmented system in which funding goes via vouchers to private and in many cases religious schools, or to charter schools that can siphon off private profit from public education money. That the government has no interest in the education of the population of the United States. That the education kids get should be directly related to their families’ access to resources and entirely constrained by what their parents are willing for them to learn—and that public schools should be forced into following the most restrictive demands of any parents. Or at least, any conservative white parents who start shouting.

And, of course, Facebook is all too happy to provide these organized groups with a platform to spread racism and anti-vaccine messaging.

This post was originally published on this site

Over the past few days, there have been genuinely baffling moments of idiocy on display by the Nazis on trial in Charlottesville in the case of Sines vs. Kessler. Chris “Crying Nazi” Cantwell screamed passages from a Slate article at Rev. Seth Wispelwey on Wednesday because he was mad that Wispelwey had praised the people who protected him from Cantwell and his ilk. Broke-as-a-joke Nazi Nathan Damigo revealed that Nazis are easier to hack than Donald Trump’s long-banned Twitter account.

Damigo, who tried filing for bankruptcy to outrun his mistakes (it didn’t work), sent a DM with the login information to the Twitter account @AntiWhiteReport. Turns out the password was a predictable mix of racism-meets-slogans-against-racism. Private messages factored heavily into the trial as it continued on Thursday. Expert witness Pete Simi, an associate sociology professor at Chapman University, took the stand and seemingly effortlessly took the defendants to task.

Simi and University of Pittsburgh psychology professor Kathleen Blee reviewed hundreds of thousands of Discord posts, thousands of messages on the Charlotteville2.0 server, and depositions and trial testimony. Their report on the defendants is alarming and crystal-clear in its assessment: “The coordinated race-based violence facilitated and committed by Defendants at [Unite the Right] is emblematic of [white supremacist movement] tactics.”

Simi is an expert witness for a reason: He’s conducted more than 100 training sessions on white supremacy for agencies like the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, published dozens of academic articles on white supremacy, and wrote the book American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate. There are plenty of cases in which Simi was an expert witness that did not result in white supremacists being so blatantly revealed as violent menaces. This trial is different.

Simi laid out exactly how the dozens of Nazis being sued in this case used racism and calls for violence, juxtaposed with humor, to not only make such horrifying beliefs more powerful but also to evoke a false sense of plausible deniability. The hope, or the defense, in this case, is that racists and fascists can post memes calling for ethnic cleansing but claim they’re “just a joke,” followed by yet another epithet. Such was the case in an alt-right server associated with Cantwell.

Through examples of racist tracts, texts, pledges, and more, Simi showed that the white supremacists on trial revere literal terrorists and white ethnostate fantasists yet are aware enough of optics to occasionally condemn some of their more abhorrent contemporary brethren. Richard Spencer made a pathetic show of trying to defend himself by revealing he rebuked Dylann Roof for murdering nine people and injuring another in a racist attack at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Simi immediately called out his behavior.

“I wrote a long article condemning him. Does that surprise you?” Spencer asked.

“No, that’s a strategy in the white supremacist movement,” Simi said, before Spencer abruptly cut him off.

The Nazis have shown their true selves time and time again. They’ve been grasping at straws for over two weeks in this trial. Even Judge Norman Moon has had enough of the pageantry and bullshit, at one point on Friday telling a lawyer that “you’re as concerned as I am about getting this case over with.” It’s more than obvious the 25 defendants are going to lose this case, yet Nazi idiots like Cantwell are dancing in court as if the trial is an extended white supremacist rally. Plaintiffs and the lawyers representing them on behalf of Integrity First for America are hitting the Nazis where it hurts and will render them as broke and toxic as they deserve to be.

This post was originally published on this site

Today in traditional media nonsense, Vice President Kamala Harris emphasized the word “the” to make a point, and it is NEWS.

No, I’m not kidding.

It is not a parody. Jennifer Jacobs is a senior White House reporter for Bloomberg News. She is tweeting about how the vice president of the United States pronounced one of the most common words in the English language.

It is true that some people, including Sean Hannity, did attack Harris for supposedly using a fake French accent on another stop of her trip to France. That was false—she said “THE plan,” for emphasis—and did not bear repeating and validating outside of right-wing circles. Jacobs might maybe possibly claim that what she’s doing here is showing that Harris employs that usage of “the” regularly. Instead, Jacobs elevated partisan attacks and rather than explicitly discrediting them, turned them into an inspection of Harris’ pronunciation more generally. It’s a kind of scrutiny that somehow keeps getting disproportionately applied to women and people of color. So mysterious. 

And Jennifer Jacobs made herself absolutely a part of that pattern. She might not have come up with the line of attack, but she treated it as worthy of repetition and consideration.

What Harris was doing will be familiar to anyone who has ever watched NFL player intros. THE Ohio State University, anyone?

This is a fake French accent:

That is … not what Harris was doing, not even a little bit, not even at all. Using a long E for emphasis in “the” is both entirely normal and not what anyone would do to sound French, at least if they’d ever heard French spoken.

But by repeating the bad-faith attacks of people dedicated to tearing down a Democratic vice president—who is, very importantly, the first woman to be vice president and the first Black vice president and the first Asian vice president—Jacobs, a prominent reporter for an ostensibly neutral news organization, suggested that not only were the attacks legitimate news, but that Harris’ speech patterns did bear watching for any hints that there might be some kind of pattern. It’s all too telling about how the media operates.

Jacobs was rightly ratioed and roasted:

This post was originally published on this site

On the one hand, an op-ed in The Washington Post  from Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the dangers of packing the Supreme Court is encouraging because it means the issue is gaining enough traction to worry him. On the other hand, fuck Mitch McConnell.

It’s McConnell at his trolling worst, and WaPo really needed to put a disclaimer on this thing: Mitch McConnell is the Senate Minority Leader who, while leading the majority, blocked President Barack Obama from filling a Supreme Court vacancy in his last year in office on the grounds that it was an election year and the voters should determine who made that appointment. He is also responsible for the appointment of Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett to the Court one week before an election. But apparently they decided to just go with ”Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is the Senate minority leader.”

As a reminder, here’s McConnell earlier this year:

Yes. He’d do it again.

So, anyway, McConnell says, “Naked attempts to bully judges have become a core priority for today’s Democratic Party.” He says, “in the most recent Democratic presidential primary, multiple candidates, including our current vice president, expressed openness to packing the court. This year, both House and Senate Democrats have introduced actual legislation to do it.”

McConnell didn’t need legislation to do it. He just needed the Federalist Society, all of their dark money, a complete lack of principles, and willingness to throw out the Constitution when it comes to the Senate’s role in the confirmation process.

McConnell also says, “Biden may have wanted to appear that he was sidestepping the issue by merely setting up a commission to study it. Don’t be misled. This was radical and unacceptable presidential behavior, part of a larger campaign to make independent judges feel as though they are on probation.”

Speaking of “radical and unacceptable presidential behavior,” remember what was happening in those weeks before the election, when McConnell was ramming through Barrett’s nomination? Trump was already declaring the election was rigged and that he expected his Supreme Court to fix it for him. “I’m counting on them to look at the ballots, definitely,” Trump said. At the time McConnell said it was “ridiculous” to suggest Barrett should recuse herself in any election case that came before the court, even after Trump’s claims. Democrats “are grasping at straws,” he said. “She has given nobody at the White House any hints or any assurances about any kinds of cases, real of hypothetical,” McConnell said.

This guy.

“Judicial independence is as fragile as it is important,” he says. “Every single American deserves every possible guarantee that they will receive impartial justice,” as if that were still a thing in the Trump courts. “It would be beyond reckless for Democrats to smash this centuries-old safeguard in a fit of partisan pique.” Because we know how much McConnell values norms and traditions.

When it comes to packing courts, McConnell is an old hand. He’s got three illegitimate judges on the court, enough to radicalize it in his own image. Neil Gorsuch is sitting in the seat pilfered from the nation’s first Black president. Oh, and to get Gorsuch there, McConnell abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. But do go on about preserving the system.

Then there’s Brett Kavanaugh, who faced numerous and credible sexual assault allegations as well as having a pretty shady financial situation on top of multiple perjury issues, none of which was adequately investigated during his rushed confirmation process. His experience, his temperament, his willingness to play fast and loose with the truth—all of that should have disqualified him from even being nominated.

Now, that’s court packing. That’s elected Republicans being willing to do anything and everything in their power to rig the system in their favor. In return, they secured a compliant Supreme Court majority, one willing to fully embrace the Court’s ignominious Jim Crow past. This is a court majority that wants the minority of the electorate and elected officials to rule. Just like McConnell ordered.

McConnell in his hypocritical trolling should never have been able to get this op-ed placed, but unfortunately that’s not how it works. However, no one should be taken in by it and certainly not those—congressional Democrats and President Biden—who have the responsibility to restore not just the Court, but the republic.