Independent News

This post was originally published on this site

JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug’s INNER HIVE. Join the team that makes Tom the Dancing Bug possible, and get exclusive access to comics before they are published anywhere, sneak peeks, insider scoops, extra comics, and lots of other stuff.  JOIN THE INNER HIVE TODAY.

PLUS you can sign up for the new free Tom the Dancing Bug Newsletter.

ALSO, PLUS you can follow @RubenBolling on the Twitters, and a Face Book, and perhaps some Insta-grams.

TWO brand new Tom the Dancing Bug books! Tom the Dancing Bug Awakens; and Tom the Dancing Bug, Without the Bad Ones! Order today, RIGHT HERE AND NOW.

“The fact that Tom the bug can keep dancing in this day and age is a testament to Ruben Bolling’s skills as a cartoonist!” –Seth Meyers

This post was originally published on this site

We begin today with Harvard Law Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin writing for CNN that while Judge Jackson’s all but certain ascension to the United States Supreme Court is a cause for celebration, the nation’s educational institutions are failing to nurture many possible future SCOTUS justices.

During her confirmation hearings, Jackson acknowledged the dramatic changes in our country over the past 60 years that facilitated her own ascent. Without the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s ban on race- and sex-based discrimination in education and employment, Jackson’s chances of attaining the sterling educational and legal credentials that helped prepare her for a US Supreme Court nomination would have been slim to none. Even with the Civil Rights Act in place, it took years of lawsuits and protests to pry open the doors of predominantly White universities and elite sectors of the legal profession for Black Americans.

But while there is certainly cause to celebrate the change that Jackson’s confirmation to the court symbolizes, that celebration is not enough. We must also question whether American institutions are doing what they must to ensure that all students – including the many people of color and young women and girls who will be inspired by Jackson’s ascent – have a real chance to achieve their full potential.

Sadly, our educational institutions still fail to nurture the talents of many American children. State-mandated racial segregation and sex discrimination are illegal today. But the likelihood of success in American K-12 and post-secondary schools still relies heavily on factors beyond an individual’s control – often correlated with race and gender in ways that reinforce the effects of past, then-lawful discrimination.

Renée Graham of the Boston Globe says that you can call the Senate vote to confirm Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court a lot of things but don’t dare call it bipartisanship.

Jackson becoming the Supreme Court’s 116th associate justice is a foregone conclusion. Yet when those final votes are counted, the Biden administration will tout as a victory that the first Black woman on the nation’s highest court was confirmed by a bipartisan vote. While true by a fragile sliver, it’s an empty flex for President Biden and his fellow Democrats.

This isn’t a boost for bipartisanship. What it represents is evidence of a party so poisoned by its own ideologies that most Republicans, including every GOP member of the Judiciary Committee, denied their support to the most qualified Supreme Court nominee in decades.[…]

Jackson, a longtime federal judge, is one of the most popular Supreme Court nominees in recent history. In a Gallup poll, 58 percent said the Senate should vote for her confirmation. After Republicans turned Jackson’s hearing last week into a conspiracy theory Twitter thread, 72 percent in a Marquette Law School national survey said they would vote for her if they were senators, up from 64 percent.[…]

So whatever you call this, don’t call it bipartisanship. That lets craven Republicans off the hook. They should instead be tarred by their own hypocrisy. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said there’s “no question” that Jackson is qualified for the high court, but he won’t vote to put her there. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska praised Jackson’s “impeccable credentials and a deep knowledge of the law,” but he opposes her confirmation.

Jonathan Leader Maynard writes for JustSecurity limning the fine legal distinctions between “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “genocide.” all of which may be applicable to the actions of the Russian military in Ukraine.

What exactly do we know, at this stage, about the nature of the violence committed by Russian forces against Ukrainian civilians? As a scholar of genocide and armed conflict, I am wary of expressing absolute confidence in any claim about violence while it is still ongoing. When we are inside the “fog of war” it is extremely difficult to piece together a reliable picture of events occurring along combat fronts or in occupied territories. Nevertheless, it is increasingly clear that the Russian military has committed serious atrocity crimes in Ukraine involving both a) the indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas, including via cluster munitions; and b) targeted killings and rapes of civilians by Russian forces. On the Ukrainian side, there is some evidence of much more limited law-of-war violations by Ukrainian troops such as the mistreatment of Russian prisoners of war, but Ukrainian authorities have denounced such violations, said any such actions must cease, and are currently investigating the allegations.

Contrary to the apologists for such abuses, these sorts of atrocities are not simply an inevitable part of war. Studies have shown that states directly target civilians in roughly 1/5 to 1/3 of all armed conflicts – an unacceptably high figure, but one which highlights how most states, most of the time, make serious attempts to respect the legal principles of distinction and non-combatant immunity.

Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall notes that the world is not at all unified on the question of what to do with regard to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

China, the world’s largest country by population, is the most visible example, trying to balance its interest in a “no limits” strategic alliance with Russia with not getting tarred by Russia’s bad acting. The issue of Taiwan is also central to the equation for China. But it’s not just China. Brazil has basically stayed on the sidelines, in part likely due to President Bolsonaro’s already pro-Russia stance. So has South Africa. Remember that South Africa is run by a party which still has among its old guard many who were either educated or trained in the Soviet Union. In recent years India has taken the first steps toward an alliance bringing together powers on either side of China as a counterbalance to China’s growth and ambitions — the so-called “Quad” of democratic states. But India too has been highly resistant to joining the condemnations and sanctions against Russia. In the case of India, the driver is at least in part the long military-to-military and weapons-sales relationship between the Soviet Union/Russia and India. Russia has also agreed to sell lots of oil to India at undermarket prices.

You’ll notice here that these are the so-called BRIC or BRICS countries. In each case there are particular drivers but the underlying and likely more driving factor is simply not wanting to get drawn into a squabble that looks to largely be about Europe and the United States. It’s not their fight and a unipolar world or one driven by the concerns of the U.S. and the EU isn’t in their interests.

Then there are the big oil producing states of the Persian Gulf. They are united with Russia in the OPEC+ group and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have both been using post-COVID inflation and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to squeeze the United States to back their policies toward Yemen and Iran.

A 10-reporter team writes for Der Spiegel that Germany may have to prepare for a worse case scenario if supplies of natural gas from Russia are halted.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany has been facing a situation that had previously been considered unfathomable. Europe’s largest industrialized nation may soon have to ration its energy supplies, essentially throttling the economy. The gas is still flowing, but many are afraid they won’t be able to rely on it for much longer. At the latest since the Kremlin announced that Russia would only accept payment in rubles for its energy exports, there has been a mood of alarm among politicians and the business community. Revelations over the weekend that the Russian military may have committed ghastly war crimes in towns under its occupation have intensified that alarms and redoubled calls for a suspension of energy imports from Russia.

German Economics Minister Robert Habeck declared the early warning stage of the emergency plan. The step primarily aimed at speeding up preparations in government agencies and companies.

How well Germany manages this emergency will determine whether the country can defend its competitiveness – or lose hundreds of thousands of jobs, as leading trade unionists have warned in recent days.

Even Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post misses former President Barack Obama

The Obama years were filled with strife, controversy and partisanship. But looking back, it’s clear what will be remembered. It won’t be Sarah Palin’s infamous “death panels” myth or even the dreadful rollout of the Healthcare.gov website. What will matter are the things that helped Americans survive a financial crash (for example, saving the car industry and stabilizing the financial industry) and gain health-care coverage. Destruction and chaos might generate temporary fervor among voters, but it’s building something sustainable that defines a politician.

“We didn’t get everything we wanted,” Obama said at the White House event announcing an expansion of the Affordable Care Act. “That wasn’t a reason not to do it.” That seemed to be a message not only for members of his party still reeling from their failure to pass the gigantic Build Back Better agenda, but also voters. Big, complex problems are not solved perfectly, immediately and permanently. Expectations cannot be too high, or moments of incremental progress will become occasions for grief. […]

Obama also reminded the country of something fundamental yet often derided in these cynical and careerist times. “We’re not supposed to do this just to occupy a seat or to hang on to power,” he said. “We’re supposed to do this because it’s a making a difference in the lives of the people who sent us here.” Courage. Principle. These are foreign concepts to the entire GOP, with exceptions you can count on one hand.

Oh.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes that we may not have had a “Great Resignation” after all.

For some time, many people, myself included, have been telling a story about this situation that goes by the name of the Great Resignation. That tale goes like this: The Covid pandemic caused many Americans to reconsider whether they really wanted or needed to keep working. Fear of infection or lack of child care kept some workers home, where they discovered that the financial rewards of their jobs weren’t enough to compensate for the costs of commuting and the unpleasantness of their work environment. Older workers, forced into unemployment, decided that they might as well take early retirement. And so on.

Well, when my information changes, I change my mind — a line often but dubiously attributed to John Maynard Keynes, but whatever. And the past few months of data have pretty much destroyed the Great Resignation narrative.

Have large numbers of Americans dropped out of the labor force — that is, they are neither working nor actively seeking work? To answer this question, you need to look at age-adjusted data; falling labor force participation because a growing number of Americans are over 65 isn’t meaningful in this context. So economists often look at the labor force participation of Americans in their prime working years: 25 to 54. And guess what? This participation rate has surged recently. It’s still slightly below its level on the eve of the pandemic, but it’s back to 2019 levels, which hardly looks like a Great Resignation…

David C. Grabowski, Marilyn Rantz, and Jasmine L. Travers of STATnews detail some proposals for improving the inadequate state of nursing home care in the United States.

About 1.3 million Americans live in the country’s 15,000 nursing homes, where they are cared for by roughly 3 million staff members. As we write this, nearly 170,000 nursing home residents are estimated to have died from Covid-19. Many, many more were isolated from family and friends during the 20-month lockdown. Bed sores, severe weight loss, depression, and mental and functional decline have spiked among nursing home residents. And nurses, certified nurse aides, and others who work in these facilities, putting their own lives at risk, have worked in the most challenging of conditions without adequate pay or support.

Sadly, the care of nursing home residents and support for those providing that care have been long-standing issues. As we heard from a daughter and caregiver of two parents with dementia who needed nursing home care, “The pandemic has lifted the veil on what has been an invisible social ill for decades.”

President Biden recommended several reforms for nursing homes during his State of the Union address. These included minimum staffing standards, increased oversight, and better financial transparency. Although these provide a start, much more comprehensive and system-level action is necessary to transform this care in the United States.

Finally today, Clare Watson writes for Nature that contracting a COVID-19 infection may increase one’s risk for contracting diabetes.

Al-Aly and Yan Xie, an epidemiologist also at the VA St Louis Healthcare System, looked at the medical records of more than 180,000 people who had survived for longer than a month after catching COVID-19. They compared these with records from two groups, each of which comprised around four million people without SARS-CoV-2 infection who had used the VA health-care system, either before or during the pandemic. The pair previously used a similar method to show that COVID-19 increases the risk of kidney disease3, heart failure and stroke4.

The latest analysis found that people who had had COVID-19 were about 40% more likely to develop diabetes up to a year later than were veterans in the control groups. That meant that for every 1,000 people studied in each group, roughly 13 more individuals in the COVID-19 group were diagnosed with diabetes. Almost all cases detected were type 2 diabetes, in which the body becomes resistant to or doesn’t produce enough insulin.

The chance of developing diabetes rose with increasing severity of COVID-19. People who were hospitalized or admitted to intensive care had roughly triple the risk compared with control individuals who did not have COVID-19.

Even people who had mild infections and no previous risk factors for diabetes had increased odds of developing the chronic condition, says Al-Aly. Of the people with COVID-19 who avoided hospitalization, an extra 8 people out of every 1,000 studied had developed diabetes a year later compared with people who were not infected. People with a high body-mass index, a measure of obesity — and a considerable risk factor for type 2 diabetes — had more than double the risk of developing diabetes after a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Everyone have a great day!

This post was originally published on this site

The atrocities committed by Russian troops in Bucha have resulted in world fury. They may not, however, be an outlier. Journalists and Ukrainian officials have little to no knowledge of what is going on in the areas of Ukraine that remain under Russian occupation, but claims that Ukrainian citizens are being forcibly deported to Russia (a possible move to “cleanse” Ukrainian cities of their current Ukrainian inhabitants) are numerous, and in Mariupol, officials are claiming that Russia is using the “mobile crematorium” units spotted prior to the war to collect and burn the bodies of possibly tens of thousands of civilians. It would not be out of character for Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s government to issue such orders, and we have already seen that Russian military units retreating from Kyiv appeared to be more dedicated to looting than they were to combat. The urgency of forcing a Russian retreat escalates with each passing day.

Russian military leaders continue to show remarkable incompetence, and new signs suggest their indifference extends to their own troops. Many of their Kyiv-area units were shredded by Ukrainian defenders, but are now apparently being redeployed east in that tattered state. The 4th Guards Tank Division, a supposedly elite Russian unit, got so thoroughly thrashed that less than half of it appears to remain—but they, too are being redeployed to the new frontlines. It may be an act of desperation, as Russia launches a new “suicidal” run to cut off Ukrainian defenders in Donetsk before eastern Europe’s spring rains turn the whole region into a muddy bog. Or it may simply be that there’s nobody left in Putin’s hollowed-out military who knows how to do anything but bomb civilians and steal washing machines.

We began the war with American military experts expressing astonishment at the utter inability of the famed Russian army to supply its own troops, coordinate their movements, or even secure their communications. None of those things have seen improvement as the war goes on, and now the very forces that found their Kyiv assault unsustainable due to the damage done to their supply lines and frontline forces are now limping, wounded, toward a Russian operation that appears to be premised on doing the very same thing.

Here at home, Republican senators are doing what Republican senators do best: nothing. Led by Rand Paul, they’re blocking steeper sanctions against Putin and Russia; in the House, 63 House Republicans even voted against a resolution expressing support for NATO and its backing of democratic principles. You can pretend that it’s weird for the party that supported Trump’s international extortion and hoax-premised attempted coup to be uncomfortable with steep punishments of governments that use violence to upend democracies, but that’s because you’re imagining the Republican Party as it was a generation ago—before Fox News made both propaganda and fascist aspirations central to the conservative movement.

Today’s news:

• ‘The Russians have turned our whole city into a death camp’
• Spring rains are coming, as Russia is increasingly desperate to show progress
• Bringing a Switchblade to a tank fight
• Senate Republican death cult kicks back in gear, aligning with Putin and COVID-19
• A Ukrainian news slowdown does not mean peace
• Not a gaffe: 63% of Americans agree Putin ‘cannot remain in power’

This post was originally published on this site

The former Border Patrol agent who in August 2019 pleaded guilty after intentionally hitting a Guatemalan man with his truck and then lying about it to investigators used text messages to call migrants “disgusting subhuman shit unworthy of being kindling for a fire” and “mindless murdering savages.” Not only did Matthew Bowen’s attorney seek to block these sort of messages from court, he defended his client’s racism by claiming “use of such words is commonplace in the Tucson, Arizona sector.” What an argument.

So does anyone outside of these agents and their defenders truly believe they should be allowed to use encrypted apps that have capability to automatically erase messages? No, but it’s happening anyway—and under federal contract.

RELATED STORY: Border agent who complained about ‘murdering savages’ pleads guilty to hitting migrant with truck

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is facing at least two inquiries into the agency’s use of the Amazon-owned Wickr app, “known for its ability to automatically delete messages,” NBC News reports. Last October, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) issued a letter to CBP’s Senior Agency Official for Records Management expressing concern “about the use of this messaging application as it has the capability to auto-delete messages after a specified period of time has passed.”

Then this week, watchdog organization CREW filed a lawsuit after CBP failed to respond to a records request into the app. 

“CBP has a notorious record of human rights abuses and exposed texts from CBP agents show an environment of racism and cruelty within the agency,” the organization said. “It is alarming, then, that CBP has a $900,000 contract with an encrypted messaging platform where agents could easily destroy all traces of problematic behavior or messages that corroborate reports of abuse with just the swipe of a finger. And from a legal standpoint, any use of the auto-burn function may also violate recordkeeping laws.”

Vice reported an initial $700,000 payment in April 2021, followed by a second contract worth $900,000 the following September. A CBP spokesperson claims that Wickr has only been used in “several small-scale pilots,” and that the department is using a version of the app that “allows for organizations to appoint administrators who can control messaging settings on the platform, including those regarding deletion,” NBC News reported.

But the spokesperson “declined to specify” further details, and CBP has an established history of protecting agents from accountability over their abuses.

This secrecy around the use of the app was also noted in NARA’s October letter, which said that the record-keeping agency became aware of CBP’s use of Wickr, along with WhatsApp, only through media reporting and an inspector general probe into U.S. border officials’ targeting of the so-called migrant caravan back in 2018. “In light of the information in the OIG report, NARA is concerned about agency-wide deployment of a messaging application that has this functionality without appropriate policies and procedures governing its use,” NARA said in the letter.

“Under Trump, White House Senior Advisor and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner came under fire for his routine use of unofficial messaging apps like Signal and Whatsapp, which also have similar auto-burn features, to conduct official business, and his failure to provide assurances that those records would be preserved,” CREW said. More recently, we found out about hours of missing phone logs on the day of the Jan. 6 coup attempt. 

CREW said that while President Biden “reversed a late-term Trump policy that would have allowed Kushner to preserve records by screenshot and has made some strides in committing to a more robust era of transparency,” CBP is a whole other issue.

“CBP, like ICE and other agencies DHS oversees, has an abysmal track record when it comes to complying with record-keeping laws,” CREW senior counsel Nikhel Sus said in the NBC News report. “This has had real consequences for accountability by impeding investigations and oversight of the agency’s activities. The agency’s use of Wickr, a messaging app with ‘auto-delete’ features, certainly raises red flags.” 

RELATED STORIES: 

U.S. has paid $60M to settle wrongful detention, assault, death claims at hands of border agents

Tactical agents harassed dozens of U.S. citizens at border over so-called migrant ‘caravan’

Far-right vigilante militias on U.S.–Mexico border enjoy a cozy relationship with Border Patrol

This post was originally published on this site

As hate crimes against the country continue to increase, people of East Asian descent are not the only victims. Asians across the country are being attacked without provocation. Most recently, a 70-year-old Sikh man visiting from India was brutally attacked in an incident being investigated as a possible hate crime, officials with the New York City Department and a Sikh-American advocacy group said.

Identified as Nirmal Singh by the Sikh Coalition, the man was left bruised and covered in blood, evidenced in a photo of the incident that has gone viral, sparking rage on social media. According to NBC News, Singh had only been in Queens for two weeks.

According to police officials, Singh was on a walk back to his temple when he was suddenly punched in the face around 6:45 AM Sunday “by an unidentified individual.” He then fell to the ground. The attacker did not say anything to him.

“It was horrific and heartbreaking to see an elderly man in such bad shape,” Gurinder Singh, who saw the victim sitting outside the cultural center minutes after the attack, told CNN. “People come to America to get a better life, but then something like this happens.”

As a result of the incident, Singh suffered a broken nose and severe bruising, United Sikhs, an international humanitarian organization taking on his case pro-bono, said on Twitter.

“Singh’s experience is another example of how innocents are target of hatred,” United Sikhs said.

On Twitter Monday the Sikh Coalition said they were in touch with the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force regarding the incident and provided video footage of the attack to aid in the probe. At this time, no arrests have been made.

“Mr. Singh is shaken and still feeling pain from his injuries, but he is gradually recovering,” Graham F. West, the communications director of The Sikh Coalition, said. “He is very grateful to everyone who has stepped forward to help him and express solidarity,” he added.

Multiple officials condemned the attack, including New York Attorney General Letitia James who tweeted: “Assaulting a member of the Sikh community is despicable, and it’s an attack on all of us as New Yorkers.”

The incident follows another attack earlier this year in January, during which a Sikh taxi driver was assaulted at JFK International Airport. The incident was also considered a hate crime because the attacker not only assaulted the driver but shouted, “Go back to your country!” amongst other derogatory phrases, including referring to him as “turbaned people,” Daily Kos reported.

According to data compiled by the FBI, between 2019 to 2020 attacks against the AAPI community rose by 73%. Additionally, last year, a Sikh Coalition analysis of FBI data found that anti-Sikh hate crimes in 2020 were at their highest level since they were first tracked in 2015. The data also indicated that hate crimes against all people of color had seen the highest increase this year.

In a statement to NBC News, Giselle Klapper, the Sikh Coalition senior staff attorney, said: “Everyone should feel safe enough to simply go for a walk, but the continued rise in hate crimes and bias incidents is increasingly making that impossible for far too many people.”

“No one deserves to be targeted by hate because of how they look, how they worship, or any other reason,” she added. “We are glad that the NYPD is investigating this incident as a hate crime, because approaching these incidents with bias in mind is the first step to reducing violent hate among our communities.”

This post was originally published on this site

For a law-and-order party, Republicans don’t seem all that interested in actual laws. At least not the ones that apply to them. They may believe the world is safer from loose cigarettes and indiscriminate hoodie-wearing, but open government corruption? Meh.

For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appears to be modeling his administration after the serial lawlessness of the Trump cabal, whose lodestar has always been Vladimir Putin. I’d suggest we all pick a Republican and commence to play Six Degrees of Adolf Hitler, but I fear it would be easier than finishing the crayon maze on the latest Denny’s kids’ placemat.

Where did DeSantis ever get the idea that he could selectively interpret Florida’s public records laws? Could it be from the numerous GOPsters who sneer at subpoenas, or Republicans’ serial violations of the Hatch Act, or Donald Trump’s flouting of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, or the fact that Trump launched an open coup attempt 15 months ago and is still churning out business-failure ideas from his prestigious private think tank (aka, his toilet)?

Or maybe DeSantis is just a natural at this stuff.

WKMG-TV, Orlando:

In a move criticized by advocates of Florida’s open government laws, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ staff intervened in a public records request related to a former appointee who is reportedly connected to a federal sex trafficking investigation, documents obtained by News 6 show.

The governor’s secondary “review” of state spending records delayed the release of those documents for more than two months, records confirm.

That delay may have violated Florida’s public records laws, according to some legal experts familiar with the matter.

Fortunately for DeSantis, there’s an almost unlimited number of immigrants and gay children in this country to scapegoat, so this is unlikely to derail his ambitions for higher office—but maybe it can inspire some of us to double down on our opposition to this dude—who’s been like a bout of syphilis for our nation’s most pendulous peninsula.

The records in question involve Halsey Beshears, the former head of the state’s business licensing agency and a party pal of Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who’s been under investigation for sex trafficking for roughly a year now.

In fact, according to a May 2021 POLITICO story, Beshears was named in a subpoena related to a grand jury investigating possible crimes “involving commercial sex acts with adult and minor women, as well as obstruction of justice.”

Beshears also served as the secretary of the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation but resigned that position amid the investigation tied to a Bahamas trip he took with Gaetz and other women.

The subpoena seeks any documents and communications the individual had with Beshears. It specifically requested photographs, videos, documents and “communications with or records of payment to or from any women you met through the above individuals or who attended parties, gatherings, or events also attended by you and any of the above individuals from January 2016 to the present.”

So, yeah, Beshears appears to be up to his neck in this potentially seismic scandal. Which is what makes DeSantis’ selective slow-walking of the public records request so problematic, according to good-government advocates.

“Once an (agency’s records custodian) has a record, that custodian must produce the record right then. It doesn’t matter that the governor has an interest in it and wants to review it later,” Pamela C. Marsh, the executive director of the First Amendment Foundation, told WKMG. “We understand that this is happening more frequently, but not consistently, such that it appears to have an objective of hiding certain information in a potentially discriminatory or content-based way.”

What? Ron DeSantis is selectively concealing information for political reasons? That doesn’t sound like him at all!

And while the DeSantis administration has claimed “the Executive Office of the Governor may review the record to ensure the accuracy and correctness of the record production,” Florida’s own guidelines state that the only delay permitted in processing a public records request “is the limited reasonable time allowed the custodian to retrieve the record and delete those portions of the record the custodian asserts are exempt.”

“Nothing in the law gives the governor power to delay the production of records by exercising any claimed right of review. It’s a fiction to claim such a right exists,” said Michael Barfield, the director of public access at the Florida Center for Government Accountability. “The law is clear that the only delay permitted is the time it takes the custodian to retrieve the records and determine if any information is exempt. Not a single case allows the governor the opportunity to further review the custodian’s production of records.”

Meanwhile, the fact that this request took months to complete—and involved a Desantis appointee whom the governor once called a “champion for deregulation”—suggests that the governor was manipulating the process for political reasons.

“The practice of the Governor’s Office reviewing record requests involving political allies violates the law because it delays access for an invalid reason,” Barfield said. “There’s no automatic delay because a request seeks records that may expose the governor to ridicule or criticism.”

In the end, the department released Beshears’ financial records to WKMG following a roughly three-month delay. The documents included expense reports and receipts related to travel, and the redactions in the final release mostly involved blacked-out credit card numbers. But who knows what DeSantis might have feared would be found in those 61 pages?

Either way, this suggests there’s a bit too much shadiness afoot in the supposed Sunshine State.

“At this point, a person requesting records has no idea when or if their original request, sent to a different agency, will be subsequently sent to the Governor’s Office and delayed—or why the records might be sent there for a second review,” said Marsh.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE. 

This post was originally published on this site

Reports last winter revealed that while the Biden administration was internally warned that Haitian deportations under Stephen Miller’s anti-asylum policy could violate human rights and international refugee law, they continued into the thousands. But just a few months later, the administration would then also issue a memo reminding U.S. border officers that they have the discretion to exempt Ukrainians from the policy. 

Cameroonian asylum-seeker Wilfred Tebah “doesn’t begrudge the U.S. for swiftly granting humanitarian protections” for families fleeing Russia’s brutal invasion, the Associated Press reports. He just seeks the same consideration for Black asylum-seekers who are also fleeing for their lives. “I will be held in prison, tortured, and even killed if I am deported,” he told the AP. “I’m very scared. As a human, my life matters too.”

RELATED STORY: DHS tells U.S. border officials that Ukrainians can be excluded from anti-asylum Title 42 order

The AP reports that Tebah is a leading member of the Cameroon American Council, which has been urging the Biden administration to grant temporary relief to Cameroonian immigrants already in the U.S. That call has been supported by leading lawmakers like Sen. Robert Menendez, who said that while he welcomed the recent designation of Afghanistan for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), he was “troubled” there haven’t been similar designations for Cameroon and Ethiopia, which are also facing humanitarian crises meriting relief.

“It is critical that TPS is not politicized to preference some countries over others,” Menendez said. “As I have said before, Black migrants are too often excluded when these important decisions are made.”

Not only are Black migrants too often excluded from these decisions, as the senator said, they’re also often singled out for abuses, with anti-Blackness deeply rooted in the U.S. immigration system. Cameroonian asylum-seekers have been abused before and during deportation flights by U.S. officials, including being unnecessarily subjected to a degrading full-body restraint. “Some of the documented cases may constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, prohibited by the Convention Against Torture,” Human Rights Watch said in a February report.

That report corroborates Tebah’s fear of reprisal should he get deported. The report said that Cameroonian asylum-seekers deported by the U.S. between 2019 and Jan. 2021 faced abuses ranging from arbitrary arrest, extortion, and rape following their arrival to Cameroon. Tebah, who is currently living with relatives in Ohio and has had an asylum petition pending since 2019, told the AP that “only TPS for Cameroon will help us be taken out of that danger. It is very necessary.”

While Ukrainian families certainly have faced challenges while seeking asylum at the southern border, the disparate treatment is glaring. In one case, after a Ukrainian mom and her children were initially blocked by border officials last month, advocates and public pressure secured an exemption within a matter of days.

By comparison, NPR reports on a Haitian family that had to wait nearly four months for an exemption. It was a Herculean effort that required aid from “three doctors, a small team of lawyers, and multiple nonprofits.”

The report noted that ”it is rare for Haitian nationals to get Title 42 exemptions,” with U.S. officials approving just 21% of requests filed by legal advocacy organization Al Otro Lado. “Just taking the case of this family, I think you can see just how difficult it is for Haitians and for other individuals aside from the Ukrainians at this point in time to obtain an exemption from Title 42,” Center for Gender and Refugee Studies attorney Blaine Bookey said in the report. The organization had also aided the Ukrainian family initially blocked by U.S. border officials.

“Black pain and Black suffering do not get the same attention,” Cameroon American Council founder Sylvie Bello told the AP. “The same anti-Blackness that permeates American life also permeates American immigration policy.” Click here to take simple and quick action urging the Biden administration to designate Cameroon for protected status.

RELATED STORIES: 

Biden admin was warned internally about Haitian deportations. Thousands have been deported anyway

Menendez urges TPS for Cameroon and Ethiopia: ‘The United States must continue to lead’

This post was originally published on this site

The Republican mayor of a New Jersey township about 20 miles southwest of Jersey City is being asked to resign after a whistleblower allegedly recorded him calling Black people the N-word, “spooks,” and “shines,” and calling women in law enforcement “f–king disasters.” Clark Township Mayor Sal Bonaccorso, the mayor in question, refused comment to NJ.com, but the news site confirmed the legitimacy of the recordings leaked last Wednesday and found through its parent company, NJ Advance Media, that Clark officials paid the whistleblower, Lt. Antonio Manata, and his lawyer $400,000 to keep the recordings hidden. The recordings also allegedly include Police Chief Pedro Matos and Joseph Testo, a sergeant of internal affairs, spewing racial slurs, NJ.com reported.

Adrian Mapp, mayor of Plainfield, a city targeted in the recordings, told the news site he recognized the voice in the recordings immediately and there was “absolutely, no question” that it was that of six-term mayor Bonaccorso. 

RELATED: New Jersey man caught on video in racist rant attempts Olympic-worthy backpedaling

“His misogynistic and racist comments quite frankly have no place in our society and should be condemned by all people, including the people of Clark,” Mapp said. The Black Democrat demanded Bonaccorso’s resignation and called his language “despicable” and “indefensible.”

Alyana Alfaro Post, spokeswoman for New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, described Bonaccorso’s alleged words as “hateful” in a statement to Daily Kos on Wednesday. “Governor Murphy is deeply disturbed by these allegations, both regarding the hateful language and subsequent misappropriation of municipal resources aimed at a misguided attempt to obscure the truth,” Post said. “There is no place in government or law enforcement for these unacceptable words and actions.” 

Although the recordings have been released recently, they are about two years old, according to a timeline NJ.com laid out from a settlement agreement between the township and Manata. In exchange for bypassing a lawsuit that would have made the recordings a matter of public record, Manata was allowed to stop working while receiving pay for more than two years, costing $289,700 for his salary alone, NJ.com reported.

Bonaccorso addressed the settlement during a township meeting NBC New York covered on Monday. “The suit that involved myself and three other people,” he said. “We wanted to vigorously fight it. Insurance company wanted to settle it on a business decision. We disagreed. Out of the $400,000, $70,000 was paid by Clark. The rest was by the insurance company.”

This isn’t the first accusation of racist rhetoric that Bonaccorso has faced. During a protest following the murder of George Floyd, he was recorded saying he was “pro-Black for all the good Black people that I know in my life.” When a protester asked what that means, he responded that he can’t say he’s for anybody he doesn’t know. “I’m for people, good people, law-abiding, hard-working, good family, good friends, people with good intentions,” the mayor said. “If you’re Black, great. If you’re white, great. If you’re Hispanic great. It doesn’t matter.”

Clark residents confronted the mayor about his rhetoric directly at the recent meeting. “I’m bringing my daughter up in this town,” resident Jessica Pizzella said. “I don’t want people when they meet her to think she’s racist cause she’s from Clark.”

Dr. LaTesha Sampson told NBC New York she was disappointed with the mayor’s response. “I guess I was really hoping for more of a heart response, something that spoke to what went out to the public, what everyone heard, those tapes that were really, really disturbing,” Sampson said. “I think in order for there to be healing, there needs to be conversations that are open, that are honest where people can express how they feel and then as a community we can move forward. To hide from that keeps the wound open and it needs to close.”

Residents in Plainfield, which has a population that is a bit less than 40% Black, have raised questions about the county that oversees Clark’s police department, Union County, and the state attorney general’s office, which has yet to complete its investigation.

Richard Rivera, an expert in internal affairs, told NJ.com it is time for the attorney general to take control. “The problem is police can’t police themselves,” Rivera said. “And the county prosecutors don’t want any part of this process, so they kick the can until it culminates in something like this.”

Former Union County Prosecutor Lindsay Ruotolo, current Union County Prosecutor William Daniel, and acting Attorney General Matthew Platkin declined comment to NJ.com, but the agencies represented by them said in a joint statement Advance Media obtained that “the investigation, once completed, will have been comprehensive, thorough, and impartial.”

This post was originally published on this site

A portrait of Oregon Republicans in 2022: Three GOP candidates are given an onstage benediction by a QAnon preacher praying over them. At a local “Lincoln Day” dinner, a group of Proud Boys—including a man under indictment for felony assault—share drinks and applause for their cohort running for a state House seat. At a debate among U.S. Senate candidates, the QAnon-loving 2020 Senate nominee compares aid to Ukraine with Donald Trump’s border wall, while she and her cohorts all condemn the nonexistent teaching of “critical race theory” for “breeding racism” in Oregon schools.

So while Oregon officials grapple with an auditor’s finding that the state is at high risk for extremist violence, it’s becoming eminently clear that one of the wellsprings of the problem is the state’s own Republican Party. Even more than the GOP on the national level, Oregon’s Republicans have descended into an open embrace of the very factions that inspire and inflict that violence.

The onstage QAnon benediction occurred last month in Bend, when self-described “prophet” Johnny Enlow prayed over and “commissioned” three Oregon Republican candidates: Marc Thielman, seeking the governorship; Darin Harbick, a U.S. Senate candidate; and Patty Adair, a county commissioner seeking reelection. They were part of a Christian nationalist “Restore: Government and Economy” summit held at Eagle Mountain Apostolic Resource Center.

Enlow assured them that, win or lose, their mere candidacies were victories for “the kingdom of God”:

“Lord, you’re showing me and want me to tell them all that you’ve already won,” Enlow said. “Whatever we contend for we actually get. Whatever we contend for, we penetrate with the kingdom of God. So when you have that interest, what you’re contending for, it will leave a mark of heaven in that place, no matter what. And so if he considers it best for you to win, then you’re going to officially win out there. But it’s a win for the Kingdom of God just the fact that you have said, ‘We’re going for this position.’ He says it will be penetrated in the spirit: It will forever be a marked as kingdom territory.

“He wants you to be at ease for what’s taking place as if you already won because you have won in his eyes,” Enlow told the candidates. “He is watching over you. He’s protecting you. So I want to declare just the protection over you, the peace of God, a canopy of grace over each and every one of them, Lord, in this process. We bless them in your name.”

“All right,” said Haaby following the prayer. “Go take this state for Jesus.”

Thielman also eagerly participated in this past weekend’s ReAwaken America event in Keizer, a Salem suburb. The rally, part of a nationwide tour by far-right “alpha male” Clay Clark, featured leading QAnon figure Michael Flynn and other Trumpist media stars: Eric Trump, “My Pillow” executive Mike Lindell, notorious homophobe Sean Feucht, and a large cast of others.

It was a nonstop circus of right-wing conspiracism and Christian nationalism. At one point, Flynn introduced a video appearance from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the onetime Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S., who launched into a pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine rant. Viganò told the audience (as he has done elsewhere) that the Russian military is actually preventing Deep State aggression and combating the “globalist cabal.” He also claimed that the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion were present at the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection.

The event drew about 4,000 attendees, with people arriving from around the Pacific Northwest. Counterprotesters also turned out. Left Coast Right Watch reports that “this was absolutely a QAnon event”:

It featured former QAnon promoters like Ann Vandersteel, Gene Ho, John Chambers, and cranks like Lori Gregory, who appeared on a QAnon show to promote antivaxx conspiracy theories. There were, in total, 38 featured speakers, at least ten of which were there specifically to promote antivaxx and COVID paranoia. It was also a highly religious event—six people on the list had “Pastor” in front of their names with other evangelical figures speaking as well.

Julianne Jackson, founder of Black Joy Oregon, told the Salem Statesman-Journal that the rally made her feel unsafe in her own community—particularly after social media postings advertised a post-rally celebration of “Anglo American identity.”

“It’s very important to read between the lines and know that means whiteness,” Jackson said. “And that means danger for people like me and people that look like me.”

Besides being present in the crowd, Thielman was publicly endorsed onstage by speaker Kevin Jenkins, and happily acknowledged the plug. Also among the crowd: Dan Tooze, the Proud Boys organizer who is running for a state House seat from Oregon City’s District 40. He took a selfie there with the Oregon Proud Boys vice president, Carl Todd.

Thielman and Tooze have a well-documented relationship of mutual avid support. Thielman, the former superintendent of schools in rural Alsea who stepped down after defying COVID-19 mask mandates, is scheduled to speak at an April 15 fundraiser for Tooze. He’ll be joined by two local Republican candidates, Clackamas County Commissioner Mark Shull and commission candidate Steve Frost.

Tooze’s Proud Boys led flag-waving protests outside Pamplin Media’s local news outlet, and then were given space on the op-ed page to promote Tooze’s organization: “When Proud Boys say, ‘I am a Western chauvinist,’ we are saying, ‘I am a proud and unabashed proponent of Western Civilization.’ That is it. It has nothing to do with race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality or even national origin. Only love of country.”

In addition to apparently driving his pickup through groups of Portland counterprotesters in August 2020—on the same night that a right-wing compatriot was shot and killed by an antifascist following a day of harassment—Tooze gained some notoriety in 2020 for leveraging Facebook’s fundraising capabilities to promote and finance violent events in Portland.

Tooze also recently played a key role in a video shared recently on social media showing a tableful of Proud Boys drinking and flashing “OK” signs at the Feb. 12 Clackamas GOP Lincoln Day Gala banquet.

The table’s centerpiece was a Tooze campaign sign. Among the Proud Boys seated at the table was Miles Douglas Furrow, the 41-year-old man indicted in January for his role in the Proud Boys violence that occurred at an August 2021 event in northeast Portland. He raises a drink to toast with the cameraman.

“I’ve always said, Proud Boys are the new Republicans,” says the cameraman as he walks up to “the most important table” and is greeted with “OK” signs.

As it happens, Tooze himself was recorded on video (courtesy of @Johnnthelefty) at the same event engaging in violence directed at counterprotesters, though he was never indicted afterwards like his comrades.

Last December, Tooze led a group of “Patriots” to invade the local Clackamas mall in an anti-masking “protest” that was nothing more than an organized attempt to harass “liberals.” Tooze’s group, organized under the name Free Oregon, staged an anti-masking protest at the Clackamas Town Center mall in unincorporated Happy Valley, an exurban area east of Portland. The group parked their flag-festooned pickups in the parking lot of a sporting goods store and proceeded to stroll through the mall, harassing store clerks and mall security personnel who attempted to enforce the mall’s mask requirements.

The absorption of radical-right actors into the GOP mainstream has been occurring in nearly all regions of the state. In Corvallis this past weekend, a debate among six of the seven Republicans running to be the nominee for Oregon’s contested U.S. Senate seat turned into an almost predictable conspiracism and disinformation carnival led by the presence of Jo Ann Perkins, the QAnon enthusiast who was the GOP’s nominee for the Senate in 2020.

Perkins disparagingly compared aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia to Donald Trump’s wall along the Mexico border. “If our government, including Mitch McConnell, can vote to send $14 billion to Ukraine, but we can’t spend $15 billion on our fences to secure our country, we have a problem,” Perkins said.

She and other Republicans railed against the Enviromental Protection Agency and blamed critical race theory for “breeding racism” in schools. Prineville Mayor Jason Beebe said the theory (which is not taught in K-12 classrooms in Oregon) is grossly unnecessary.

“I teach my kids to be respectful to everyone,” Beebe said. “You do not treat someone badly, no matter what they are, who they are, what they believe and anything that they choose to do.”

Motel owner Darin Harbick from Blue River and Grant County Commissioner Sam Palmer have been the top two fundraisers in the race so far, having outraised Perkins several times over. But Perkins enjoys a huge populist following in the state, particularly among its Patriot constituents.

Mainstream Republicans have been wrestling with the far-right takeover of the party apparatus for over a year now, following the vote by the party faithful in February 2021 to unseat Chairman Bill Currier, a vocal Trump supporter, and replace him with state Sen. Dallas Heard, a Republican from Myrtle Creek notorious for aligning with far-right causes. Heard led a pro-Trump protest at the Oregon Capitol in Salem on Jan. 6, 2021, at the same time as the U.S. Capitol insurrection—and had previously led a rally on Dec. 21, 2020 in which Patriots attacked and successfully breached the Oregon Capitol.

It has been, as OPB’s Sergio Olmos observed, a gradual process taking place in incremental steps over several years: “Small militant groups like the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer and various militias have at times acted as muscle for conservative rallies throughout Oregon and Washington,” he writes. “But the frequency with which the party has embraced once fringe characters did not slow in the time before or since Jan. 6, as heated talk spilled into violent actions.”

Heard stepped down as party chair in early March, accusing his fellow Republicans of “communist psychological warfare tactics” intended to “destroy anyone of true character.” His letter explained that he can no longer “survive exposure to the toxicity that can be found in this community.”

“The endless slander, gossip, conspiracies, sabotage, lies, hatred, pointless criticism, blocking of ideas, and mutiny brought against my administration has done what I once never thought possible,” Heard wrote. “They have broken my spirit. I can face the Democrats with courage and conviction, but I can’t fight my own people too.”

The bizarro world takeover has begun driving out ordinary mainstream Republicans, including the party’s 2018 gubernatorial nominee, Kent Buehler. His final straw came in February 2021 after party officials passed a resolution claiming that the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection was a “false flag” intended to smear Trump.

“I don’t know what the Republican Party stands for,” he said. “It’s almost become a cult of personality. Is it possible to re-correct? Absolutely.”

This post was originally published on this site

After initially reporting on Apr. 1 about a bizarre case in Washington, D.C., where police discovered five fetuses in the home of an anti-abortion activist, now we learn that the fetuses came from a box filled with 115 fetuses that a truck driver allegedly allowed the activists to take.

The home was occupied by Lauren Handy, the director of activism for the group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU).

RELATED STORY: Police find five fetuses in home allegedly occupied by ‘director of activism’ with pro-life group

During a news conference Tuesday led by Randall Terry, founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, along with Handy, PAAU founder and executive director Terrisa Bukovinac, and others, the activists claimed that a driver with Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services allowed them to take a box they would later learn was filled with 115 fetuses. 

“During the five days they were under my stewardship, the 115 victims of abortion violence were given a funeral mass for unbaptized children and 110 were given a proper burial in a private cemetery by a priest,” Handy said.

Handy and Bukovinac claim they were at the Washington Surgi-Clinic on Mar. 25 for a protest when they saw the Curtis Bay truck driver with the boxes.

“We asked him [the driver] if he knew what was in the boxes,” Bukovinac said at the news conference. “He said no. So, we told him, ‘dead babies.’”

Bukovinac says after the driver “confirmed the boxes were from Washington Surgi,” she then asked the driver if he would “get in trouble” if they “took one of these boxes.” The driver asked what they would do with them, and “Lauren said, ‘We’ll give them a proper burial and a funeral,’” Bukovinac said.

“The driver said ‘okay,’ and gestured toward the box. Lauren immediately grabbed the box off of the dolly and we brought it back to her apartment,” Bukovinac said.

Bukovinac claimed when they opened the box “in the presence of a Catholic deacon,” they found the “remains of 110, mostly first-trimester aborted children.” She says they also found another plastic bag inside the box, which they claim contained the “remains of a beautiful intact and nearly full-term baby boy.”

Bukonivac says she and Handy found three more “full-term babies” and that they “alerted D.C. homicide” and gave them the location of the five fetuses, demanding an investigation and a “proper burial for the remaining five children,” she said.

Handy, who identified herself as a “devout Catholic,” claimed that the “five children” were “advanced in their gestational age” and had suffered from “wounds” suggesting “violent federal crimes.” She says she arranged for the medical examiner to pick up “the children.”

At the time the fetuses were removed from Handy’s home, D.C. Police Executive Assistant Chief of Police Ashan M. Benedict informed reporters that the fetuses were aborted legally, according to D.C. law. “There doesn’t appear to be anything criminal about that—except for how they got into that house,” Benedict said.

Handy was indicted by a federal grand jury on Mar. 31 along with eight others after breaking into and blocking access to the entrance of a D.C. abortion clinic in Oct. 2020.

In a statement sent to The New York Times, Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services denies all of the allegations made by PAAU.

“On March 25, a Curtis Bay employee took custody of three packages from the Washington Surgery Center [Washington Surgi-Clinic] and delivered all of them to Curtis Bay’s incineration facility,” the statement reads.

Curtis Bay additionally denied that the driver handed packages over to the protesters. “Any allegations made otherwise are false,” the company’s statement asserts.

Melissa Fowler, chief program officer with the National Abortion Federation, told the Times in a statement that “Anti-abortion individuals and groups are increasingly resorting to extreme and illegal antics to attempt to intimidate clinic workers and patients, and stop them from seeking or providing abortion care.”