As cities and states nationwide continue to implement COVID-19 vaccine requirements for specific positions, many are refusing to comply. As a result, individuals are not only being let go from their jobs but contracting the coronavirus. In one incident an officer from California reportedly died from coronavirus complications after missing the city’s deadline of being vaccinated by Nov. 1. The officer, identified as Officer Jack Nyce of the San Francisco Police Department, died Saturday at the age of 47.
Prior to his death, he was among 41 officers placed on administrative leave for not meeting the city’s immunization deadline for officers, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Several civilian workers have also been placed on leave. While he and the others were placed on paid administrative leave if not vaccinated by Nov. 13, the officers will be placed on unpaid administrative leave until further notice.
“A widely respected colleague most recently assigned to Park Station, Jack served our City and our department honorably and well for more than 17 years, in roles that included a variety of assignments,” Chief Bill Scott said in a statement. “I will share more information about plans for his remembrance as they become available. In the interim, please keep Jack, his family and friends in your thoughts and prayers during this difficult time.”
According to his wife, Melissa Nyce, Jack Nyce tested positive for COVID-19 on Nov. 2. “He loved being a cop,” she told the Chronicle. The symptoms of the 17-year veteran of the department becamesevere on Saturday after which he was transported by the ambulance to a local hospital and died later that day, Melissa Nyce said.
According toThe Washington Post, Nyce’s death comes at a time in which many police departments across the country are struggling to enforce city vaccination mandates. While several officers have threatened to resign over vaccine requirements, some even have protested and urged others to ignore the deadline with them under the movement “hold the line.” Lawsuits have also been filed by police officials who are requesting exemptions to the vaccine requirement.
According to theChronicle, almost 200 members of the San Francisco Police Department have applied for a religious exemption from the city’s employee vaccine mandate, the highest number of waiver requests from any city department across the country.
As of Monday, the city’s human resources department confirmed that 98% of employees are now vaccinated. Nationwide studies have shown that COVID-19 is the No. 1 killer of law enforcement officers in 2021.
COVID is the #1 killer of LEOs in 2020 and 2021 with more than 300 confirmed/presumed cases, and 170+ under review. Please get vaccinated. Share in roll call and on your dept’s social media @ODMPpic.twitter.com/g8iRsNwbto
According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, there were at least 269 officer deaths reported due to COVID-19 in 2021. Gunfire was listed as the second leading cause of death in officers, with 54 deaths.
Remember back in August 2020 when former unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf presided over a political stunt that used immigrants as human props as part of an effort to reelect the previous president? A number of the immigrants who were sworn in as U.S. citizens in that White House naturalization ceremony would later say they weren’t informed prior to the stunt that it would be broadcast as part of the Republican National Convention.
Plenty of experts at the time said it was a corrupt and illegal act. We didn’t need an official investigation to figure that out. It was right there in front of our eyes. But we do have one now.
Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner reported on Wednesday that the Office of Special Counsel has determined that at least 13 officials with the previous administration violated the Hatch Act, “illegally mixing campaign and government events.” Among those named is, unsurprisingly, Unlawful Chad. The Office of Special Counsel said in the report that the administration had been warned repeatedly that such an event would be unlawful. The stunt went on anyway.
“As late as 10 a.m.on the morning of the ceremony—just 45 minutes prior to the event—the DHS ethics official emailed DHS leadership, including the [DHS General Counsel] stating that Acting Secretary Wolf should not participate in the ceremony.” Unlawful Chad feigned ignorance in his written statement to the Office of Special Counsel, claiming he “did not know whether video of the ceremony was going to be made publicly available or that it would be used at the Republican National Convention.”
“Although the OSC could not prove that Wolf knew the ceremony would be part of the convention, it makes very clear that Wolf would have been hard-pressed not to know that,” notedThe Washington Post’s Philip Bump. The Office of Special Counsel does note that “circumstantial evidence strongly supports the conclusion that he knew, or should have known, of its intended use by the White House.”
Why are we giving crooks the benefit of the doubt anyway? This would not be the only time Unlawful Chad would corruptly use his (unlawfully appointed) office to campaign for the previous president, basically carrying out a tour in the final days leading into the 2020 election. In Arizona, he falsely claimed the inhumane and unlawful Reman in Mexico policy created “a safer and more orderly process along the Southwest border.” Human rights advocates have documented the policy, which resulted in over 1,500 instances of violence against asylum-seekers. In Texas, Unlawful Chad held a campaign event next to updated border wall. That was just five days before Election Day, Border Report said.
”Taken together, the report concludes that the violations demonstrate both a willingness by some in the Trump administration to leverage the power of the executive branch to promote President Trump’s reelection and the limits of OSC’s enforcement power,” the Office of Special Counsel said in a release. None of this even gets into how the previous administration used the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) ceremony for this political stunt after spending years decimating the office.
Following the previous president’s electoral defeat, USCIS was reportedly among the agencies forbidden from having any contact with President Joe Biden’s transition team. It would not be until Biden’s administration that USCIS would have a Senate-confirmed director for the first time in two years.
One other character found to have violated the Hatch Act is former aide and noted white supremacist Stephen Miller, who during a media appearance “mocked candidate Biden as being under the control of ‘23-year-old’ campaign staff.” It’s a scant mention in the report for someone who was the architect of some of our nation’s most inhumane immigration policies—and has never been held accountable for it. And likely will never be. “I think Stephen Miller should be behind bars,” Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar said earlier this year. Instead, there’s an active campaign to block any justice for separated families.
Affordable child care is one of the major ways the Democrats’ Build Back Better will help families with young children. So, naturally, Republicans are revving up the disinformation machine. The party that specializes in coming between a woman and her doctor is falsely accusing Democrats of trying to come between families and their churches, or, specifically, their church-based child care.
“Democrats are ending decades-old, bipartisan protections for religious preschools and child care centers that will pressure facilities to choose between federal funding and their faith,” Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted. According to The Washington Examiner, “If you want to send your children to a church daycare or a pre-K program, again, the Democrats offer you nothing.”
These are lies. In reality, the bill plainly reads: “Nothing in this section shall preclude the use of such [subsidies] for sectarian child care services if freely chosen by the parent.”
And, as HuffPost’s Jonathan Cohn points out, “this is one of those rare moments when you can glimpse a lie in its infancy, before it’s taken hold.” Top Republicans are starting to tell the lie, but memes about it aren’t yet flooding Facebook.
It’s not just the language of the bill that says child care money from Build Back Better could go to religious programs, as Cohn shows.
“Religious providers are absolutely eligible, and we’re excited for them to be part of this,” Sen. Patty Murray’s communications director told HuffPost. University of Virginia law professor Micah Schwartzman confirmed to HuffPost that it “is, in effect, a federally funded voucher program to be administered by state governments. The program explicitly includes religious providers.”
And here’s the director of a church program: “The whole idea is for it to be a system that’s open to everybody, so it’s mixed delivery, whether it’s faith-based or [secular] private child care, or Head Start, or public school preschool.”
Faith-based programs would therefore benefit from the added funding. Under the plan, many families would get free child care, while families earning up to 250% of their states’ median incomes would pay no more than 7% of their income. That means lots of families would be able to afford to send their kids to good child care programs for the first time.
As of 2018, the average cost of center-based infant care in the U.S. was $1,230 per month. The Center for American Progress reported, that, “On average, a family making the state median income would have to spend 18% of their income to cover the cost of child care for an infant, and 13% for a toddler.” Build Back Better proposes to fix that major cost, and pay early childhood caregivers more. Currently, early childhood care providers, “more than nine in ten of whom are women and more than four in ten of whom are women of color,” a Biden administration fact sheet noted, “are among the most underpaid workers in the country and nearly half receive public income support programs. The typical child care worker earned $12.24 per hour in 2020—while receiving few, if any, benefits, leading to high turnover and lower quality of care.” That high turnover, and the resulting lower level of care have led to a crisis for the child care industry during the pandemic.
Improving that system improves things for the entire industry, and for the parents who need care for their young children.
It’s true that faith-based programs might have to comply with some new requirements. For instance, livable wages for teachers. Additionally, the universal pre-K component of the plan does phase in new requirements for lead teachers to have bachelor’s degree in early childhood education. But those requirements would apply equally to all programs.
So would anti-discrimination requirements, which—even with some loopholes allowing religious organizations to hire people exclusively of their religion for certain roles—might cause some religious providers to howl and file lawsuits. But that would be a minority of programs. Specifically, the ones that want to violate anti-discrimination policies.
Additionally, Cohn notes, according to the legislation, “eligible child care providers may not use funds for buildings or facilities that are used primarily for sectarian instruction or religious worship.” But “you can’t build a new church with public child care money” is miles away from Cotton’s “Democrats are ending decades-old, bipartisan protections for religious preschools and child care centers that will pressure facilities to choose between federal funding and their faith.”
Republicans are starting to build the framework of another culture war lie. Don’t believe it for a moment. But if Sen. Joe Manchin wants to demand, as one of his requirements for voting for Build Back Better, that religious child care centers have to be included in the funding, his fellow Democrats can absolutely say yes to that. They don’t even need to tell him that it was already in there—wouldn’t want to strain his brain too much.
The final declaration of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow has yet to be approved. But unless a big surprise happens in the next few days, that document will move the world inches forward in combatting the climate crisis when we need to move miles.
Not that the summit has been without strong warnings about the impacts of inadequate action. Those have come from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, from leaders ranging from Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley and former President Barack Obama to European Commission President Ursula von de Leyen, and from Indigenous protesters like Ponca elder Casey Camp-Horinek and climate activists like Kenyan Green Generation Initiative founder Elizabeth Wathuti.
Kenyan climate activist Elizabeth Wathuti
And there have been a few moments of promise—more than 40 nations calling for a phase-out of coal, a 130-nation vow to cut back on methane production, the agreement of fierce rivals China and the United States to work together to reduce their prodigious methane emissions, two dozen nations announcing they will stop funding fossil fuel projects in other countries in 2022, and seven nations and a Canadian province signing onto Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance’s moves to end oil and gas exploration and production. But encouraging as these developments are, their goals are non-binding, and no deadlines are set.
It was certainly satisfying for Americans who accept the science behind the warnings to see the U.S. rejoining the Paris agreement. President Joe Biden’s speech at the summit was heartening after four years of grotesque climate lies, and the destruction or undermining of many of the modest climate-related policies in place before Biden’s predecessor in the White House got his hands on them. Biden said:
My friends, if we’re to recognize that a better, more hopeful future, every nation has to do its part with ambitious targets to keep 1.5 degrees in reach and specific plans of how to get there, especially the major economies. It’s imperative we support developing nations so they can be our partners in this effort. Right now we’re still falling short. There’s no more time to hang back or sit the of the fence or argue amongst ourselves. This is a challenge of our collective lifetimes, the existential threat to human existence as we know it. And every day we delay the cost of inaction increases.
Exactly so.
But there is a significant disconnect between his words and the action Biden took just days before he left for Glasgow—plans to lease hundreds of millions of new oil and gas operations in seven states in February. Next week, as announced in August, the Interior Department will also put 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico on the auction block for new drilling. Emily Portecorvo reports:
“This oil and gas ‘megasale’ will rank as the largest ever in U.S. history and more than breaks Biden’s campaign promise” to end drilling on public lands and waters, said Brittany Miller, press officer for Friends of the Earth, which sent a letter signed by more than 250 groups asking Biden to cancel the sale.
Last month, a U.N. report found that fossil fuel production plans of the world’s major nations will be producing 110% more coal, oil, and gas in 2030 than would align with keeping the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C. Another study published in September found that holding the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees requires 60% of oil and gas reserves to stay in the ground. Opening up millions of acres for continued exploration and production is contrary to every nation doing “its part with ambitious targets to keep 1.5 degrees in reach and specific plans of how to get there …”
Right now, there is the additional problem with the pandemic inflation, which is reflected pretty much across the economy—and not just in the United States. Besides at the grocery store, this inflation has been particularly apparent at gasoline pumps because oil prices have soared. This has generated calls for Biden to do something to drive those prices down. In July, he asked the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates to increase their oil production. Fearful of the potential impacts of higher gasoline prices on the 2022 midterm elections, a number of Democrats have called for Biden to ban oil exports.
On Wednesday, Chris Cuomo, one of CNN’s news anchors, suggested that Biden immediately summon oil CEOs to the White House and get them on board to lower prices by cranking up supply. It’s hard to imagine a more cognitively dissonant way to send these executives away high-fiving each other and to flip the bird at our desperate need to get ourselves off the fossil fuel teat that is feeding global warming. We have a long way to go before words mesh with actions.
ECO-TWEET
Just boggles the mind that @POTUS & @Interior are planning to EXPAND oil drilling in the Gulf and lease MORE areas for drilling. Pardon my French but, WTF https://t.co/lFkCxSh5Tg
The names of coal miners whose lives were cut short by the mine are carved into a memorial on Aug. 25, 2019, in Cumberland, Kentucky. In Harlan County, the heart eastern Kentucky’s coal region, Cumberland has lost nearly half of its population since 1980 primarily due to disappearing coal jobs.
Last month, Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and 11 Democratic co-sponsors introduced S.2966, the American Energy Worker Opportunity Act of 2021. Last week, Michigan Congressman Andy Levin introduced a companion bill in the House with 15 Democratic co-sponsors. The idea is to include this as part of the Build Back Better bill. As noted in a press release from Brown’s office:
We propose a worker-driven transition plan for fossil-fuel workers. Congress would provide billions in investment over a span of 10 years to assist workers who are laid off as the nation shifts to cleaner, renewable energy sources. This temporary energy worker transition program would provide a wage supplement, health care benefits, education and training funds, as well as an additional education benefit for children. The proposal would also prioritize employers who plan to hire eligible workers for the clean energy grants created under the Build Back Better plan.
An eligible worker under the bill is one whose job was terminated from a coal mine, coal-fired power plant, coal transport, or oil refinery, provided that the worker was employed continuously full time for at least 12 months before being laid off. Such workers would receive wage replacements or supplements in addition to assistance to maintain health benefits and contribute to retirement. Workers would also be eligible for grants for education and training up to and including a four-year degree. Children of dislocated workers would receive direct grants allowable education and training up to and including a four-year degree.
The bill is endorsed by: United Steelworkers (USW), United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA), AFL-CIO, BlueGreen Alliance, National Wildlife Federation, League of Conservation Voters (LCV), Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund.
When you examine the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF) through a historical lens, it looks pretty damn good. Throughout US history there has actually been pretty strong support for robust government investment in people and infrastructure so long as the beneficiaries of said largesse were white. The New Deal and the GI Bill enjoyed broad support, but, as Ira Katznelson wrote in When Affirmative Action Was White, “the GI Bill did create a more middle-class society, but almost exclusively for whites.”
As people of color began to demand their fair share of the public pie (which they helped bake through back-breaking, wealth-creating work by, among other things, picking cotton and grapes and laying railroad tracks), the political will for public investments dropped dramatically.
From Prince Edward county, Virginia, shutting down its schools entirely rather than desegregate in 1959 to the fierce resistance to Obamacare, getting support for any public investments has been a Herculean task. As a result the infrastructure has atrophied in ways that endanger the public in general and poor people and people of color in particular.
The Flint, Michigan, water crisis showed how aging lead pipes can create a health crisis. Every lead pipe in the country will now be replaced. The pandemic laid bare the digital divide of who has access to high-speed internet and who doesn’t, and now rural areas can get broadband access.
Politically, you don’t have to look far back into history to understand the importance of the infrastructure bill. No legislation at all would be coming out of Congress had Stacey Abrams and the Georgia civic engagement groups not flipped the two Senate seats in the January runoff elections. Given where we were, I’m feeling that the BIF is a BFD.
Joe Biden’s infrastructure legislation, even in its scaled-back form, is an obvious policy success. Its $1.2tn in funding for roads and bridges, mass transit and rail service, as well as upgrades to ports, the electric grid and water infrastructure will pay dividends for generations to come.
The real questions rest around the political aspect of this policy victory. This is the second major piece of legislation from the Biden administration, along with the important withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. Yet somehow Biden and the Democrats appear weak and ineffective to many Americans. […]
From the perspective of this socialist, the pending Build Back Better bill may actually try to do too much, throwing money at problems that require more coordination, planning and state capacity to properly solve. Biden would be far better able to sell his agenda if it centered around a few big, fully funded and universal programs.
Of course, the design of the emerging BBB bill is not Biden’s fault alone. It reflects the varied (and sometimes rotten) interests of the Democratic caucus and the unwieldiness of the American political system.
For now, Biden has a much-needed political win. But I, once again, can’t help feeling that the best days of Bidenism might already be behind us.
The announcement in 2016 that Diablo Canyon, the three-decade-old operation that is California’s last nuclear power plant, will be shuttered by 2025, brought cheers and objections. “This is an historic agreement,” said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, one of several groups who pushed for the shutdown, “It sets a date for the certain end of nuclear power in California and assures replacement with clean, safe, cost-competitive, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy storage.” But some critics decried the move, pointing out that the plant provides 1,500 jobs and $1 billion a year to the local economy. Other objections came from pro-nuclear environmental advocates who worry that the state cannot achieve a full transition to clean energy if the plant switches off its two 1.1-gigawatt reactors too soon. The shutdown process has nonetheless moved forward, not least because the plant is surrounded by geological fault lines.
Now, a new study—An Assessment of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant for Zero-Carbon Electricity, Desalination, and Hydrogen Production—argues in favor of keeping the plant running until 2035 and “would reduce California power sector carbon emissions by more than 10% from 2017 levels and reduce reliance on gas, save $2.6 billion in power system costs, and bolster system reliability to mitigate brownouts.” Continuing operations to 2045 and beyond, the authors says, could save up to $21 billion in power system costs.
The plant, they assert, could add significantly to freshwater supplies through desalination and at much lower cost than that provided by the environmentally problematic Delta Conveyance Project. It could also produce clean hydrogen and do so more cheaply than solar or wind, the authors assert. It also could increase the reliability of the grid as wind and solar provide an increasing percentage of the state’s electricity.
Said former U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who has long cautioned against a “premature” shutdown of nuclear power plants, “We are not in a position in the near-term future to go to 100% renewable energy. We will need some power that we can turn on and dispatch at will, and that leaves two choices: fossil fuel or nuclear.”
Reversing direction on the shutdown would require undergoing the lengthy process of renewing Nuclear Regulatory Commission operating licenses for the reactors, which expire in 2024 and 2025. It would also require overcoming the political clout of the forces that spurred Pacific Gas & Electric to agree to the shutdown in the first place.
• Nations, automakers pledge no new fossil fuel cars by 2040: “As representatives of governments, businesses, and other organizations with an influence over the future of the automotive industry and road transport, we commit to rapidly accelerating the transition to zero-emission vehicles to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement,” the declaration stated. Signed by 33 countries, six automakers, 40 cities, and a handful of financial institutions and investors, the pledge is non-binding. Among those not signing: the United States, China, and Japan, three of the world’s top four auto markets. The fourth, Europe, did sign on.
Crew of a whaling ship check a whaling gun or harpoon before departure at Ayukawa port in Ishinomaki City on April 26, 2014.
• The Enormous Hole That Whaling Left Behind. “The mass slaughter of whales destroyed far more than the creatures themselves. In the 20th century, the largest animals that have ever existed almost stopped existing. Baleen whales—the group that includes blue, fin, and humpback whales—had long been hunted, but as whaling went industrial, hunts became massacres. With explosive-tipped harpoons that were fired from cannons and factory ships that could process carcasses at sea, whalers slaughtered the giants for their oil, which was used to light lamps, lubricate cars, and make margarine. In just six decades, roughly the life span of a blue whale, humans took the blue-whale population down from 360,000 to just 1,000. In one century, whalers killed at least 2 million baleen whales, which together weighed twice as much as all the wild mammals on Earth today.” By Ed Yong
Flames consume multiple homes as the Caldor fire pushes into the Echo Summit area,in California on Aug. 30, 2021.
•Why fire experts are hopeful. Wildfire scientists dispel common misconceptions about forest management, detailing what needs to change and why it’s urgent, by Kylie Mohr. “A team of more than three dozen people from universities, conservation groups, and government labs published an unusual trio of scientific papers in August in the journal Ecological Applications. Together, the studies are meant to provide a roadmap for how land managers and policymakers can move from passive to proactive wildfire and forest management.”
• A billion people will suffer extreme heat at just 2°C heating: A new study says the deadly combination of temperature and humidity could increase the number of Earthlings exposed to extreme heating by 15 times over what is today the case. The U.K. Met Office assessed wet-bulb temperature, which combines both heat and humidity. At 35°C, the human body can no longer cool itself by sweating. Even healthy people sitting in the shade will die within six hours. Damian Carrington reports, “The deadliest place on the planet for extreme future heatwaves will be the north China plain, one of the most densely populated regions in the world and the most important food-producing area in the huge nation, according to 2018 research.”
As Daily Kos has contextualized while covering anti-queer legislation proposed and implemented by Republicans, LGBTQ+ people report disproportionate rates of mental health issues like anxiety and depression and harassment, abuse, and even homelessness. An important aspect of that context is looking at the situation with an intersectional lens: understanding, for example, that trans women of color experience disproportionate rates of violence in a different way than a white, cisgender gay male might.
According to a study released in October by the Williams Institute, LGBTQ+ American Indian and Alaskan Native adults (AIAN) report higher levels of mental health struggles, as well as economic instability and abuse, than their non-queer peers. The report stresses that it is “critical” for interventions and policies to actually address and consider gender identity, sexual orientation, and race and ethnic background, as reported by LGBTQ Nation.
This report offers subsets of data for AIAN people who identify as only AIAN (more than 160,000 LGBTQ+ adults in the U.S.) as well as those who identify as multiracial (124,000). In total, the data suggests at least 285,000 LGBTQ+ AIAN adults live in the U.S.
The report found that about 60% of LGBTQ+ AIAN adults live in the West and South and that more than half identify themselves as religious. Most queer, cisgender AIAN respondents said they felt connected to the LGBTQ+ community, though just over one-third of trans AIAN adults said the same. About one-third of AIAN LGBTQ+ respondents said they felt connected to AIAN communities, with about three-quarters of respondents saying they felt support via some kind of social community.
Somáh Haaland, a nonbinary queer person who uses they/them pronouns, spoke to NBC News in an interview about life as an LGBTQ+ AAIN advocate. Haaland serves as the media coordinator for the Pueblo Action Alliance and is also the child of U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
“Being queer and being Indigenous are both beautiful identities to carry that are sacred when they intersect,” Haaland told the outlet, stressing that “we often must fight twice as hard just to show that we are worthy of living and thriving.” Haaland explained that they’ve heard from friends about their struggles to feel acceptance both at home and with white LGBTQ+ people, adding, “In white queer spaces they experience racism and disconnection, while at home or on their reservation they may feel like being out could exclude them from cultural activities.”
LGBTQ+ respondents were more likely to drink heavily, along with other behaviors designated as “high-risk,” for example. More than 40% of respondents have been diagnosed with depression. More than 80% said they’d experienced verbal abuse in their lifetime, while more than 50% said they’d been physically or sexually assaulted. LGBTQ+ AIAN respondents were more likely than non-queer respondents to say they felt unsafe and insecure.
75% said they didn’t have enough money to cover all of their necessities in the year before the survey. Almost 50% said they’d experienced a significant financial crisis. 19% said they’d been fired or laid off in the previous year. Among AIAN-only adults, unemployment and food insecurity rates are similar across LGBT status. More than 40% of AIAN-multiracial LGBTQ+ adults said they experienced food insecurity.
LGBTQ+ AIAN respondents were more likely to be uninsured. Fewer LGBTQ+ AIAN respondents said they had a personal physician than non-LGBTQ+ respondents. LGBTQ+ AIAN respondents reported a higher prevalence of some health conditions, like diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and asthma.
Facebook is a menace. COVID-19 is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. We can talk about all those things in the abstract, look at the numbers and statistics, and catch the occasional whiff of seditionist right-wing rhetoric. But I hadn’t really fully understood just how horrifying that combination of right-wing extremism, Facebook, and a killer virus was until I became a regular at the Herman Cain Awardssubreddit. This series will document some of those stories, so we are aware of what the other side is doing to our country.
We get this story from the perspective of the wife.
Narrator: “A common, yet fatal mistake.”
Can someone point to anything at all that would suggest that Republicans care about any homeless person, including homeless veterans?
Can anyone point to anything at all that would suggest that Republicans care about children after they’re born? Did any of them vote for the monthly child tax credit? Did they fight for masks in schools? Do they propose more school funding? Do they work to get families with young children out of poverty? How about restricting gun access so kids don’t have to do “active shooter” drills in school? Do they praise Big Bird for helping kids and their families stay safe via vaccination?
It’s a rhetorical question. We already know the answer.
Who is going to tell her that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are not the same thing?
And does “pursuit of happiness” include being alive and not getting shot, having shelter and food on the table, being able to buy a wedding cake no matter the kind of relationship, etc?
If farts killed millions of people globally, then yeah, we’d sure as hell would need to find a way to stop that spread. Presumably, we’d get special N95 underwear to deal with it. Big deal. Why is that in the least bit controversial?
It’s the first appearance of “Let’s go Brandon” in this series! For those of you who might now know, it’s the right-wing’s stupid new stand-in for “Fuck Joe Biden.” They think it’s hilarious.
Husband and wife both got COVID, and she’s like “oh no big deal see y’all in 10 days lolz ha ha.” She’s bought into the nonsense that it’s “just like the flu.” Five days later, reality sets in.
I’ll also note, for the record, that Joe Biden and CEOs did not put her and her husband in the hospital. They were trying to keep them (and everyone they come into contact with) out of the hospital. No good deed goes unpunished.
Hey guys, COVID is real, which is a thing everyone had been saying, but Facebook memes knew better and ha ha ha sheep want to put plugs up their butt because a Democrat in the White House is so scary illegals and Gadsden Flag FREEEDOM!
Had she listened to credible news sources that didn’t include the conservative media, she and her husband would know that COVID is actually quite devastating. She would know that hundreds of thousands of people are suffering excruciatingly painful deaths, and millions more recover but with long-haul COVID and a litany of health problems. She would know that a simple free jab would protect the vast majority from those dangers, as well as protect everyone else around them.
She says that she wonders if she chose wisely or not, after two weeks in the hospital (which she’ll now need to pay for, perhaps without her husband’s income) while her husband is intubated with a low chance of survival. Is there any outcome at this point that will lead to a “yeah, it was okay to remain unvaccinated” answer? But really, it’s clear she knows the truth: “I’m feeling that maybe we chose wrong.”
There’s an interesting divide between those who cling to their wrong choice to the bitter end, and those like this woman who realize they fucked up. The latter are hopeless. But cases like this? She was misled by the media she consumed. The entire conservative anti-vaxx apparatus is one big murder machine. It is incredibly effective at activating and mobilizing the Trump base—we saw that in Virginia and New Jersey last week—and it doesn’t care if it murders thousands of its own supporters along the way.
Meanwhile, this woman thought Joe Biden and CEOs were inhibiting her pursuit of happiness, when in the end, it was conservative media and COVID that did the trick.
During his 2018 run for the Senate, Republican Mike Braun was getting a lot of attention for a campaign strategy that relied on self-funding, sweetheart loans from allies, and “creative” accounting to dodge federal election laws. Over three-quarters of his campaign war chest consisted of “loans” to the campaign; he’d continue to prop his campaign up with his own money until the campaign’s end.
Braun has been in the Senate for two years now, and the Federal Election Committee (FEC) has finally managed to come to some conclusions on which parts of that were illegal and which weren’t. The answer? The Braun campaign’s accounting wasn’t so much “creative” as it was outright shoddy and improper. Over $8.5 million in “loans”—a massive chunk of Braun’s total spending—that violated campaign finance laws, including $1.5 million in “loans” from Braun’s own company. Millions more in donations and disbursements were misreported, as well as six-figure repayments to Braun himself afterwards.
If it looked crooked during the campaign, surprise! The FEC agrees with you, and is demanding the Braun campaign answer further questions about all of it.
Braun is now flailing a bit in his response, as might be expected. His campaign’s defense was to claim to the FEC that their campaign treasurer, Travis Kabrick, had suddenly up and vanished on them. Sorry, he “has not been able to be located since the end of 2018.” So … sorry?
You see where this is going, right? Of course you do. The Daily Beast looked into this claim, and The Daily Beast found Travis, quote, “within minutes.” They were able to call his current place of work, find his social media accounts, and get his contact information.
“His mother said in a phone call that she would pass along a request for comment,” reports the Beast.
While it is very good news that a single news outlet was able to help out Mike Braun and his campaign after their multiyear battle to hunt down the man they’re now attempting to pin all the shenanigans on, the scope and egregiousness of the violations would seem to make the campaign’s claims nonsensical. It wasn’t the treasurer who arranged an allegedly illegal $1.5 million “loan” from Braun’s self-owned company to Braun’s political campaign. It wasn’t the treasurer who cashed checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars in reimbursements for supposed “self-funded” donations. And it wasn’t the treasurer who was making the calls when companies associated with Braun’s top allies were providing $7 million in unusual and conspicuously unsecured campaign “loans.”
So Braun himself is in more than a little hot water here, and the campaign’s going to have to answer for campaign finance “mistakes” that point not so much to accounting errors from an unskilled finance team as they suggest a truly massive improper funding operation from Braun and his political allies.
Will anything come of it? Who the hell knows. We’ve gotten used to lawmakers breaking whatever campaign finance laws they want to and, at worst, paying a few fines after the fact. But the “me and my corporate friends are going to finance the majority of my Senate campaign with corporate ‘loans’ provided with no collateral or assurance of repayment” is not an accounting error. It’s buying a Senate seat. It’s the sort of overt corruption that all of the laws were designed to prevent, and Mike Braun seems to have just waltzed right over the law to do it anyway.
If you want to see an article so loaded with caveats and wiggle-wording that it’s nearly falling over under the strain, check out the Fox News headline about critical race theory being taught in many K-12 schools.
First off, “Critical Race Theory taught at many of America’s 50 most elite private K-12 schools, according to new study.” Okay … those are private schools. No one is forcing anyone to send their kids there. The market, which Fox News loves so much, is fully in control there. As part of an effort to fearmonger about CRT in schools, this flops the instant you read the headline and give it a split-second of thought.
But this is Fox News, so we’re not counting on anyone doing that. In fact, the network is counting on people not doing that.
“Democrats and liberal pundits [are] claiming CRT isn’t taught or doesn’t exist,” according to the piece. That’s false: CRT absolutely exists. But it isn’t taught in public schools to children.
What are the results of this “study”?
”CriticalRace.org found that 21 of the [50 top private] schools had some form of mandatory anti-racism training for students, while a staggering 40 schools had some sort of curricular requirement change based off of anti-racism, DEI, or critical race theory.”
Mandatory anti-racism training or anti-racism, DEI, or critical race theory covers a lot of ground, guys! Isn’t it interesting how CRT is in the headline, but once you read the article, it’s one item on a list of things that includes anti-racism and diversity, equity, and inclusion? It’s almost like they’re using the right-wing buzzword to draw attention and you only learn that these schools are not necessarily teaching it if you read the fine print. Go figure.
“The response from the mainstream media and Democrats to this parents’ movement has been to ramp up denial that CRT is taught, but that is just a word game. The principles of CRT, primarily the focus on race and skin color as the decisive and pervasive features of society, increasingly pervade K-12,” William Jacobson, the Cornell law professor who did this very reliable study, told Fox News, playing word games himself while showing that he either doesn’t know what critical race theory is or is happy to misrepresent it for a Fox News audience.
So why should people who aren’t planning to send their kids to one of the top 50 private schools in the country care what those schools do? Because, according to Jacobson, those schools are the ”proverbial canary in the coal mine” for other K-12 schools. You know, like how public schools have followed the lead of expensive private schools on having small class sizes and lavish libraries and athletic fields and student centers. (I’m not a fan of emojis, but sometimes I do wish Daily Kos provided me with an eye-roll emoji.)
Jacobson explained further, “The economic elites who send their children to these schools at great expense have voluntarily surrendered their children to an activist and consultant educational class that sees exploiting race as a way to power and riches.” This doesn’t make any sense. He threw some buzzwords into a bag, shook it up, and came up with this jumble, any given three words of which will doubtless make Fox News viewers angry and paranoid but … rich people who are choosing which schools to spend a lot of money sending their kids to are then just kind of giving up on their children and letting other people get rich off of leading them astray? And therefore public school parents should be worried that the same thing will happen in their kids’ schools, even though no one is getting rich off of those?
But none of it matters. Fox News got “critical race theory” and “K-12 schools” into a headline, and that’s enough to keep the fear simmering for people whose real objections are to schools teaching about Martin Luther King Jr. and Ruby Bridges—and, crucially, about the white people who fought to keep them and other Black people from the most basic civil or human rights.
It’s been over a week since 50-year-old Black cyclist Elliot Reed was mercilessly beaten by a racist white man while riding through his neighborhood in Seabrook, Texas, a suburb of Houston.
The white man has been identified as 25-year-old Colin Fries, who according to Reed, stopped his car next to Reed on Oct. 29 at a stop sign and began to berate him, telling Reed he didn’t belong in there.
“He’s just looking at me at the stop sign,” Reed told KPRC2. “He said, ‘You need to get out of this neighborhood because you’re making a lot of people nervous.’ He said, ‘You don’t live here, and if I catch you, I’m gonna do something to you,’” Reed says.
Reed tried to ignore Fries, but when Fries got out of his pickup truck, Reed took out his cell phone to record the encounter.
“I asked him, ‘Are you the law, sir? What’s going on?’ He said, ‘You’re just making people nervous,’” Reed said. When Fries got out of the car he began using the N-word, Reed says.
Bystanders reported to police that Fries began chasing Reed, and when he caught up to him on the sidewalk, he started punching him until he passed out. According to witnesses, Fries punched Reed over a dozen times, even after he fell unconscious.
The savage attack left Reed with cuts on his face, a broken tooth, a fractured cheekbone, and a burst blood vessel in his eye.
But, of course, this is Texas, so the Harris County District Attorney’s office has only charged Fries with a misdemeanor for aggravated assault.
Reed’s wife, Angie Reed, says she believes her husband was attacked for one reason and one reason only: “because he Black.”
She says when went to see her husband after the attack and walked into the hospital room, “I started crying and the nurses started crying.” She says her husband will need surgery to repair the damage to his eye and the attack could have cost him his life.
“It was the witnesses who told the police that he was hit about 12 times after he was already unconscious,” she said.
She added, “I don’t care where you live, you don’t deserve to be disrespected by the color of your skin.” Fries reportedly was arrested and released on a bond of $100 after being charged with misdemeanor aggravated assault, a charge Angie Reed called “insulting and disrespectful.”
A representative from the attorney general’s office said in a statement, “We are still in the initial stages of reviewing this incident … What happens in relation to an increase in the charge or an addition to a hate crime will depend on the entirety of the evidence.”
According to KPCR2, Seabrook Police Chief Sean Wright said the incident didn’t appear to be a hate crime, citing previous “conflict” between neighbors.
The Reeds say they don’t know Fries. They never met the man.
“I don’t feel safe in my own neighborhood where I pay taxes and am a law-abiding citizen of Seabrook,” Reed said.
