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Post by mhbruin on Aug 18, 2022 8:02:47 GMT -8
I’m trying to organize a hide and seek tournament, but good players are really hard to find.
Tonight They Gonna' Party Like It's 1858
"You will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.
...
"Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.
From Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union Speech
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 18, 2022 8:22:08 GMT -8
Rick Scott Wants to Destroy the Government
It is unusual for a U.S. senator to publicly warn Americans not to apply for a job and threaten to eliminate it.
But that's what Senate Republican campaign chair Rick Scott, R-Fla., did this week, publishing an open letter encouraging job seekers not to pursue new IRS positions, vowing that Republicans, who hope to take control of Congress next year, will quickly "defund" those jobs.
Scott claimed the Biden administration will use the Democrats' newly enacted Inflation Reduction Act to create "an IRS super-police force" to "audit and investigate" ordinary Americans. "The IRS is making it very clear that you not only need to be ready to audit and investigate your fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you need to be ready and, to use the IRS’s words, willing, to kill them," he wrote, referencing a job posting for the agency's Criminal Investigation division, which has been mischaracterized.
Scott's depiction of a new force of IRS agents targeting average Americans lacks basis in the text of the new law and has been dismissed by Democrats as a fabrication. It was debunked — indirectly — by formal guidance Wednesday by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to the IRS.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 18, 2022 8:24:03 GMT -8
Note to the POWM (Party of Old White Men): Women Can Vote
A new report from TargetSmart—and data obtained by TargetSmart since the report was released Tuesday—shows women outpacing men in voter registrations in a series of states, including some with the most hotly contested elections this November.
In Wisconsin, where Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes is challenging Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, women have out-registered men by 15.6 percentage points among the nearly 13,000 people who have registered to vote since June 24.
Michigan voters will not only choose their governor and secretary of state—right-wing extremist Tudor Dixon is challenging Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and election denier Kristina Karamo is challenging Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to oversee the state’s elections—they’ll also be voting on a ballot measure protecting reproductive rights. And in Michigan, women have out-registered men by 8.1 percentage points since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision put abortion rights at risk in the state.
In Pennsylvania, women have out-registered men by 17 points since June 24. Pennsylvania has not one but two marquee races: Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman vs. celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz for Senate, and current Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro vs. extremist conspiracy theorist Doug Mastriano for governor. Mastriano has tried to back away from his opposition to abortion ban exceptions for rape or incest by saying, falsely, that the governor wouldn’t have any say over state abortion policy anyway, but Democrats are not letting him get away with it.
In Ohio, the registration advantage among women since Dobbs is 11 points, according to TargetSmart, and in North Carolina, it’s seven points.
By contrast, in New York and Rhode Island, where abortion is protected by state law, new voter registrations are nearly equal for women and men.
So Can Hispanics
Republicans, not Democrats, are experiencing greater erosion of Latino voter support, in part because of the overturning of the landmark ruling that made abortion legal, a Democratic pollster said Wednesday.
Fernand Amandi, a principal with Bendixen & Amandi, said in the key states of Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania — which have competitive gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races this year — Latinos favor keeping abortion legal by large margins: by 30 points in Arizona, 40 in Nevada and 41 points in Pennsylvania.
Those numbers are "signs that to me suggest Republicans overreached badly and are alienating the Hispanic vote," Amandi said.
He emphasized, though, that Florida presents a different scenario.
"Florida is a problem a lot of people should be concerned about if they want to see Democrats do well. There is an erosion problem in Florida. We have lost tremendous ground in Florida. However, I do not necessarily see Florida-type reversals in the other states," he said.
Amandi said if the performance of Latino voters with Barack Obama in 2012 — when he got 70% of the Latino vote — is used as the measuring stick, there has been erosion for Democrats at the presidential level.
But he said his recent polling shows that it would be exaggerated to speak of a demise of the Hispanic votes with the Democratic Party.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 18, 2022 8:46:14 GMT -8
He's No Bernie Madoff, But He's High in the Pantheon of Scam Artists
Contributions to Trump’s political action committee topped $1 million on at least two days after the Aug. 8 search of his Palm Beach, Fla., estate, according to two people familiar with the figures. The daily hauls jumped from a level of $200,000 to $300,000 that had been typical in recent months, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic information.
The influx comes at a crucial time for Trump as he considers an early announcement for a 2024 presidential campaign and has seen dwindling returns on his online fundraising solicitations earlier this year. The former president’s PAC brought in $36 million in the first half of the year, dropping below $50 million in a six-month period for the first time since he left office, according to Federal Election Commission data.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 18, 2022 9:10:38 GMT -8
What Do You Get When a MAGA Gets Brain Fog? I Don't Want to Know.
Up to two years after Covid-19 infection, the risk of developing conditions such as psychosis, dementia, “brain fog,” and seizures is still higher than after other respiratory infections, the researchers report in their study published Wednesday in the Lancet Psychiatry. But while anxiety and depression are more common soon after a Covid-19 diagnosis, the mood disorders are transient, becoming no more likely after the two months than following similar infections such as flu.
Children were not more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety or depression, right away or up to two years after Covid, and their risk of brain fog subsided over two years. But they were still more likely than children recovering from other respiratory infections to have seizures and psychotic disorders. Overall, the likelihood of all these diagnoses was lower in children than in adults.
On variants, the risk of neuropsychiatric diagnoses rose, from 10% higher for anxiety to 38% for brain fog — after the Delta variant emerged than after the alpha version. Similar risks continued with Omicron, even though that variant has milder effects during the acute phase of infection.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 18, 2022 9:14:57 GMT -8
Randy Rainbow Remembers Yesterday
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 18, 2022 9:22:35 GMT -8
34 Years for a Sunni Disposition
A Saudi court has sentenced a doctoral student to 34 years in prison for spreading “rumors” and retweeting dissidents, according to court documents obtained Thursday, a decision that has drawn growing global condemnation.
Activists and lawyers consider the sentence against Salma al-Shehab, a mother of two and a researcher at Leeds University in Britain, shocking even by Saudi standards of justice.
So far unacknowledged by the kingdom, the ruling comes amid Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's crackdown on dissent even as his rule granted women the right to drive and other new freedoms in the ultraconservative Islamic nation.
Al-Shehab was detained during a family vacation in January 2021 just days before she planned to return to the United Kingdom, according to the Freedom Initiative, a Washington-based human rights group.
Al-Shehab told judges she had been jailed for over 285 days before her case was even referred to court, the legal documents obtained by The Associated Press show.
The Freedom Initiative describes al-Shehab as a member of Saudi Arabia's Shiite Muslim minority, which has long complained of systematic discrimination in the Sunni-ruled kingdom.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 18, 2022 9:25:59 GMT -8
I Am Still Seeking the Universe Where This Makes Sense.
In June of this year, seven weeks before the FBI raided former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in search of classified materials, former Defense Department appointee and outspoken Trump loyalist Kash Patel vowed to retrieve classified documents from the National Archives and publish them on his website.
Trump had just issued a letter instructing the National Archives to grant Patel and conservative journalist John Solomon access to nonpublic administration records, according to reporting at the time.
Patel, who under Trump had been the chief of staff for the acting defense secretary, claimed in a string of interviews that Trump had declassified a trove of "Russiagate documents" in the final days of his administration. But Patel claimed Trump's White House counsel had blocked the release of those documents, and instead had them delivered to the National Archives.
"I've never told anyone this because it just happened," Patel said in an interview on a pro-Trump podcast on June 22. "I'm going to identify every single document that they blocked from being declassified at the National Archives, and we're going to start putting that information out next week."
Patel did not provide a clear explanation of how he would legally or practically obtain the documents.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 18, 2022 9:30:49 GMT -8
Maybe Previous Guy Should Just Call Saul
His current legal team includes a Florida insurance lawyer who’s never had a federal case, a past general counsel for a parking-garage company, and a former host at far-right One America News.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 18, 2022 9:51:00 GMT -8
30 Years in Jail For Being An Abuse Victim.A Mother Jones investigation found at least 139 women, disproportionately women of color, have been imprisoned for someone else's child abuse conviction under a dangerous law that went in effect in 2009 in Oklahoma. It’s meant to criminalize parents for failing to protect their children from child abuse. The problem is that prosecutors seem to be interpreting “parents” as “mothers,” in some cases leading to harsher sentences for the nonabusive parent than the actual abuser. According to the legal statute, “’failure to protect’ means failure to take reasonable action to remedy or prevent child abuse or neglect, and includes the conduct of a non-abusing parent or guardian who knows the identity of the abuser or the person neglecting the child, but lies, conceals, or fails to report the child abuse or neglect, or otherwise take reasonable action to end the abuse or neglect.” She Never Hurt Her Kids. So Why Is a Mother Serving More Time Than the Man Who Abused Her Daughter?
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