James.galbraith

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A federal court judge on Wednesday allowed a Florida rule to continue that bars the state Medicaid program from reimbursing patients for most forms of gender-affirming care.

Judge Robert Hinkle denied a preliminary injunction request from a coalition of transgender rights groups seeking to stop the rule. The groups previously filed a lawsuit against Florida over its ban on Medicaid covering the cost of gender affirming care.

Hinkle said the lawsuit addressed a potential violation of Medicaid law rather than a broader constitutional issue. The lawsuit alleged the state violated parts of the equal protections clause of the Constitution and anti-discriminatory language in the Affordable Care Act and the Medicaid Act.

“There’s nothing wrong with the state saying they will approve treatment for this and not that,” Hinkle said shortly before he ruled against the preliminary injunction from the bench. “The question here is about the Medicaid statute.”

The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration created the rule that banned covering gender-affirming treatments such as hormone therapy and surgery in August.

The groups filed the lawsuit on behalf of four people — August Dekker, Brit Rothstein, and two 12-year-old children identified in the lawsuit as “Susan,” who is a transgender girl, and “K.F.,” who is a transgender boy. Rothstein was already pre-approved by AHCA, which regulates the state Medicaid program, to have gender-affirming surgery in December.

Florida is one of at least 10 states in the country that blocks Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, which can include behavioral therapy, hormone-blocking medications and, in rare instances, surgery.

Lambda Legal Counsel Omar Gonzalez-Pagan told Hinkle that Rothstein’s surgery was cancelled after AHCA finalized the new rule.

“It was scheduled and then this rule came, and now it’s not happening anymore,” Gonzalez-Pagan said.

In response, AHCA lawyer Mohammad Omar Jazil told Hinkle that the rule allowed for some exceptions, including in some instances where a patient was pre-approved for treatment. Hinkle promised to note the exception for Rothstein’s surgery in the ruling that he said will be handed down soon.

Wednesday’s hearing included testimony from three witnesses brought by the state. One, New Jersey resident Yaakov Sheinfeld, testified that his 18-year-old daughter began transitioning at the recommendation of a therapist who determined her feelings of gender dysphoria, depression and anxiety could be treated with prescription hormones.

Gender dysphoria refers to the feelings of discomfort or distress some transgender people experience when their bodies don’t align with their gender.

Sheinfeld, who was recruited to testify by lawyers for AHCA, said his daughter’s anxiety and depression never went away, even after his daughter had gender-affirming surgery. She was later found dead in an East Orange, New Jersey, hotel room of a drug overdose.

“All I know is the system — the world, the Internet, her friends — informed her to take this journey,” Sheinfeld said, fighting back sobs. “And now she’s dead.”

A comic about going outside in the fall when you live in the PNW.

View on my website

The Washington Post is now reporting that the FBI has interviewed a Mar-a-Lago witness who has admitted to moving boxes containing government documents to Donald Trump's private residence on the property—after a subpoena was delivered to Trump ordering the return of classified documents. The witness account provides yet another detail suggesting Donald Trump took explicit steps to hide the documents he took from the White House, including highly classified national security secrets, even after a court order demanding their return.

The Post reports that the witness, whose identity is unknown, first told the FBI they did not handle the documents or boxes containing them. When confronted with Mar-a-Lago security camera footage showing them moving the boxes, the witness's story "changed dramatically," with the witness admitting that they had moved the boxes at Donald Trump's direct request.

It's not clear whether the witness is an employee of Mar-a-Lago, a personal aide to Trump, or part of the legal team surrounding Trump. It also may not even be new information: The federal government asserted when obtaining permission for the search of Mar-a-Lago that the evidence suggesting Trump was continuing to hide stolen classified documents included "eyewitness" testimony.

As Marcy Wheeler notes: "What has changed" as a result of this story is that "Trump has more of a line on" that FBI source. The leak to the Post may have the primary effect of narrowing down, in the Trump camp, who the "eyewitness" refusing to lie to the FBI on Trump's behalf might be.

Trump now knows that one of the people who personally handled the boxes, and on his specific orders, is testifying to federal agents. That would narrow it down to a bare handful of Trump associates.

Whether this leak is from a pro-Trump source who's using it as an opportunity to clue Trump's defense team into who the government's key witnesses are or is from investigators pushing the information to probe what Trump's reactions will be, it again serves to emphasize that the FBI knows a lot about what Trump did between the time the federal government asked him to return government documents, some highly classified, and the day they drove into Mar-a-Lago to take those documents back via court order.

Investigators know Trump claimed he had returned all such documents, despite that being a clearly false statement; they know he moved the documents after the government told him they were aware he was lying. They also believe there are additional documents still unaccounted for.

That leads us right back to the next question: Why are federal agents not conducting similar searches of Trump's other residences? They have proof Trump lied to them in an attempt to hide stolen classified documents. They have photographic evidence that Trump moved boxes similar to the ones found at Mar-a-Lago to his New Jersey estate.

But there's been no searches of those additional locations, even after Trump provably hid national security secrets in his Mar-a-Lago office? Why?

Another day, another report of Florida governor and dollar-store Trump impersonator Ron DeSantis flagrantly breaking the law. This one was uncovered by ProPublica, which is now finally able to shed some light on what happened last year when DeSantis threw a public fit over the Republican-held state legislature's proposed congressional maps, vetoing them and replacing them with his own heavily gerrymandered version.

It wasn't fully clear at the time just how DeSantis had come up with his map, one that produced 20 Republican-leaning districts to just eight Democratic ones and which erased Black Democrat Al Lawson's northern Florida district, redistributing his 46% Black district among four majority-white ones. The answer, reports ProPublica, is that DeSantis hired on a team of national Republican consultants notorious for Republican gerrymanders in other states.

The National Republican Redistricting Trust is the Republican National Committee's own strategy team for crafting pro-Republican gerrymanders around the nation, and "general counsel and senior advisor" Jason Torchinsky was among those brought in by DeSantis deputy chief of staff Alex Kelly to come up with new Florida maps that would more heavily favor the Republican Party. Another was Republican redistricting guru Thomas Bryan, who "works with the party," he says, on redistricting efforts as assigned by Torchinsky.

So there's your answer. The new maps Ron DeSantis demanded be used for Florida redistricting, the ones he vetoed Republican-drawn maps in order to implement, were crafted by the same Republican Party-backed team responsible for partisan map-drawing in Texas, Virginia, and other key states. Of course it was. There's no way anyone in the governor's office, whether it be DeSantis or Kelly, would have been able to produce a 20-to-8 Republican advantage in a near-50-50 swing state. They called in the experts, and the experts returned with a new map that skewed as heavily Republican as could be mustered.

There's only one problem with that. Well, several, but one big one: It's illegal. The Florida constitution was amended in 2010 to bar partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, an amendment that Republicans began violating immediately until the state Supreme Court knocked some heads around, ordering its own maps be implemented and voiding illegally drawn Republican versions.

That was the status quo for the next half-decade, until Dollar Store Trump came along. The Republican legislature last year drew up maps that were still mostly based on the court-ordered versions, and it was that begrudging willingness by Florida lawmakers to actually pretend at following the law that set DeSantis off. He was reportedly furious, and ProPublica notes that he even vowed to veto any map that left Lawson's 46% Black district intact.

So that's when the governor's office sought national help and came back with the partisan version, in brazen violation to the state constitution.

The real question here, of course, is whether anything of substance will actually come of DeSantis violating the state laws he swore an oath to uphold. This would generally be an impeachable offense, if anybody in Florida gave a damn about anything, but the Perv-a-Lago state has seen Republicans brazenly do illegal things so often that it's difficult to imagine this instance of crookery will even stand out. The Supreme Court, now mostly packed with Ron DeSantis appointees, could throw out the DeSantis maps as illegal and draw its own version yet again, but even if that happens the DeSantis map will be used for Florida elections from now until then.

It's a pattern we've seen again and again, whether it be support for Trump stealing classified documents after being voted out of office, Matt Gaetz getting away seemingly free and clear after news of his cocaine-and-sex-trafficking habits broke, or DeSantis staging a stunt that's bumped up perilously close to federal kidnapping charges when his agents lied to migrants, complete with fake pamphlets and other props, to coax them into being trafficked elsewhere. None of these people appear to have any compunction against breaking state and federal laws whenever they want to, and they remain confident that there's not a damn thing anyone can actually do about it.

Still, though. Ron DeSantis made a big show of demanding a new ‘election security’-minded private police force, one that’s devoted itself to finding and arresting a handful of Florida voters who thought their voting rights were restored (because the Florida government put them back on the voting rolls.) It turns out the biggest illegal act was orchestrated by Ron DeSantis himself, because of course it was. Ron DeSantis: just another career criminal with a campaign office.

RELATED STORIES:

Treasury watchdog probing whether DeSantis misused federal pandemic funds to help aid Martha's Vineyard stunt

Attorneys for migrants tricked by DeSantis say now-identified 'Perla' will be named in suit

The company Ron DeSantis paid $1,565,000 to fly 50 migrants from Texas to MA is a GOP donor

'It’s really unconscionable': The more we learn about DeSantis’ election victims, the worse it looks

Hoo boy, the media is working hard to drag John Fetterman down and boost Mehmet Oz in the Pennsylvania Senate race. The ableist pile-on of the past day, with major media figures painting Fetterman’s ongoing stroke recovery—which does not involve cognitive impairment—as a major concern was bad enough. But the Associated Press (AP) is giving that stiff competition for the title of the week’s worst coverage of the race.

The AP lead an article titled "Fetterman, Oz vie for Black voters in close Pa. Senate race” with a vignette in which Oz hugs a woman and asks her “How do you cope?” after she recounts the killings of her brother and nephew. What the article failed to mention is that the woman was an Oz campaign staffer.

John Fetterman needs your help to overcome not just Republican dark money spending but a media determined to drag him down. Can you chip in $3?

RELATED STORY: Media paints Fetterman's closed captioning as bigger campaign issue than Oz's abortion ban evasions

Only after Fetterman’s campaign manager called the AP out was the story corrected: 

Even then, the AP didn’t attach an editor’s note explaining the correction. The text was simply, silently changed, adding the phrase “who has been an employee of Oz’s campaign for Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate seat” before “and said, ‘How do you cope?’”

That’s bad enough. But Parker Molloy notes that, in addition, Marc Levy, one of the authors of the piece, chose to promote it with a tweet quoting a speaker in a Republican Jewish Coalition ad who turns out to be a Republican consultant. The article identifies the quote as coming from an ad but does not provide context for who this Black woman criticizing Fetterman in a Republican Jewish Coalition ad is, professionally speaking. Levy’s tweet doesn’t even do that much (and no, he wasn’t up against the 280 character count, to say nothing of the fact that he could have chosen another quote).

There is room for good reporting here. At least one recent poll showed Oz’s deficit with Black voters shrinking to 34 percentage points, something that, the AP notes without actually referring to the poll, could make a difference in a tight race. But leading with Oz showily empathizing—in the style of the syndicated talk show host he made his name as—with someone who turns out to be his employee without identifying her as his employee is straight-up journalistic malpractice. Then they compounded that with a Republican consultant’s appearance in a Republican group’s ad without identifying her as a partisan operative. Then, when called on the first betrayal of basic reporting practices, the AP failed to do what it really needed to do in the way of a correction.

Combined with the media blitz attempting to undermine public perception of Fetterman’s ability to do the job, it really looks like a concerted effort to make the horserace more fun for reporters to cover, and to prove, by being extra hard on a Democrat while giving a Republican a pass for everything from dodging questions on where he stands on a national abortion ban to promoting fake COVID-19 cures and slaughtering dogs, that there’s no “liberal bias” at play. It’s a very familiar pattern, and it gets more and more toxic with time.

RELATED STORIES:

Oz said uninsured Americans don't have 'right to health,' a hell of a thing for a doctor to say

Report details exactly why Mehmet Oz kept pushing hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has a lot of appealing to do! On Wednesday, a jury in Waterbury, Connecticut, awarded compensatory and punitive damages in the defamation cases brought by families of the lost Sandy Hook Elementary school children. Hosting his Infowars conspiracy misinformation show, Alex Jones used his platform to continuously lie about the victims of the worst shooting in recent American history, where 20 young children and six adults were murdered. The affected families were dogged by Jones’ listeners because Jones said the families were pretending to have lost their children in wide-ranging conspiracies concerning deep state gun control and other hooey.

The jury awarded a total of $965,000,000 in compensatory damages to 15 plaintiffs in this consolidation of three separate defamation cases against Jones. Another jury already awarded $50 million to parents of a murdered Sandy Hook child in August. Some of the Sandy Hook parents present in the courtroom cried as the decisions were announced. Punitive damages were also awarded, but Connecticut limits those to lawyer and court fees.

RELATED STORY: Judge rules louder than Alex Jones’ mouth, ruling against him in defamation case

Marissa Alter of News 12 Connecticut reported the breakdown of the damages:

• Robbie Parker was awarded $120 million
• David Wheeler was awarded $55 million
• Francine Wheeler was awarded $54 million
• Jackie Barden was awarded $28.8 million
• Mark Barden was awarded $57.6 million
• Nicole Hockley was awarded $73.6 million
• Ian Hockley was awarded $81.6 million
• Jennifer Hensel was awarded $52 million
• Donna Soto was awarded $48 million
• Matthew Soto was awarded $57.6 million
• Jillian Soto was awarded $68.8 million
• Bill Aldenberg was awarded $90 million
• Erica Lefferty was awarded $76 million
• William Sherlach was awarded $36 million
• Carlee Soto-Parisi was awarded $66 million

None of this will bring back these families’ loved ones. May Jones spend 26 lifetimes atoning for his sins.

Good judges are more important now than ever. In some states, judges are on the ballot this November. In this episode of The Downballot, we shine a spotlight on elections for state supreme courts: actor and activist Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Together, Daily Kos and Julia are proud to announce their endorsement of seven Democratic candidates running for closely divided courts in Michigan, North Carolina, and Ohio. You can support this slate by going to JusticewithJulia.com and donating today.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I really have a comic like this but apparently I've written so many dirty jokes about clowns it's hard to find on google.

Today's News:

Preview page!

More info here: http://beawolfbook.com/

It’s a really not good thing that in voters in so many states are put in charge of picking state judges, unlike almost all the other countries in the world. It’s a bad idea because a) it’s difficult for voters to make informed choices, and b) it leads judges to court and potentially be controlled by partisan interests. For Ohio voters, three Republican justices who are running for reelection on the state Supreme Court helped on the first issue, making it a little easier to make their decision on who to vote for, by proving that second problem: how influenced they are by partisan interests.

Cleveland’s ABC affiliate, News 5, obtained the questionnaires that current Justices Sharon Kennedy, Pat DeWine, and Pat Fischer filled out to get the support of Cincinnati Right to Life PAC back in March. All three of them agreed that there is no constitutional right to abortion. That’s before the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned that right.

Each of the justices also agreed with the assertion from the forced birth PAC that “An unborn child is biologically human at every stage of his or her biological development, beginning at fertilization.” From fertilization. Ohio could go from legal abortions up to 22 weeks to enforcing a personhood law with these three justices.

Campaign Action

News 5 points out that whenever they’ve asked justices for their position on certain topics, they refuse to respond saying they are not allowed to comment on pending cases or issues that might come before them. “We’re not allowed to comment on cases that are pending in front of our court or in any other court,” DeWine once told News 5.

When trying to get the forced birther political support, however, DeWine was happy to check off the box about abortion, while Dobbs was pending at the U.S. Supreme Court. The difference, of course, is that the Right to Life PAC candidate questionnaire isn’t a public statement. It was also pretty clear back in March, given what the SCOTUS extremist majority had done with the Texas abortion law, that it was going to severely limit—if not outright overturn—Roe’s constitutional protections to abortion.

Which made it inevitable that an abortion case was going to come before the Ohio Supreme Court. Which it will. The states’ six-week abortion ban is currently blocked by a lower court judge and will work its way up.

Pro Choice Ohio and Equality Ohio called foul, as did Dr. Tracy Pearson, an ethics and bias lawyer who told News 5 that the justices responding to the highly partisan questionnaire “demonstrates that you are not upholding the integrity of the legal system and administering the courts in a fair and impartial way.” That breaks the Ohio Code of Judicial Conduct, Pearson said.

“What you’ve done is you’ve made almost a campaign promise,” she added. “You’ve made an implicit promise.”

That’s exactly what they’ve done. On the one hand, it’s a travesty because it is not what judges—especially Supreme Court ones—are supposed to do. On the other hand, thanks for making your corruption so freaking obvious for voters to see.

We can’t vote out all the extremist U.S. Supreme Court justices who sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and lied through their teeth about respecting the precedent of Roe. But the voters in Ohio can make sure these three are booted.

Daily Kos has endorsed incumbent Justice Jennifer Brunner, Judge Terri Jamison, and Judge Marilyn Zayas to flip the Ohio Supreme Court. Currently, it has a Republican 4-3 majority, but one relatively moderate Republican justice has repeatedly sided with Democrats to rule against GOP gerrymanders there. However, she’s retiring. Democrats need to pick up a seat and add two more: Jamison and Zayas. That wouldn’t just keep abortion legal in Ohio, it would provide a critical bulwark against Republicans trying to steal the White House in 2024.

That’s also true in Michigan and North Carolina, where Daily Kos has endorsed Supreme Court candidates to help save democracy. Please help us help the candidates in these three states with your donation.

Abortion rights, climate change, and gun safety are all on the ballot this fall, and there are literally thousands of ways to get involved in turning our voters. Plug into a federal, state, or local campaign from our GOTV feed at Mobilize and help Democrats and progressives win in November.

RELATED STORIES:

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

By Alex Henderson In the United States, gas prices were decreasing during the summer months — much to the relief of the Biden Administration. But with the 2022 midterms less than a month away, Biden officials and Democratic strategists are not happy to see gas prices increasing once again. Journalist Ken Klippenstein, in an article published by The Intercept on October 11, emphasizes that higher gas prices are politically advantageous for the government of Saudi Arabia — which would prefer to have Republicans rather than Democrats in control of the United States’ federal government. “When, jus…

Read More

“The PM is panicking and reaching for almost anything that she can do to calm the situation."

By David Badash,The New Civil Rights Movement Appearing at a campaign even Tuesday embattled Republican Senate nominee for Georgia, Herschel Walker, mocked transgender service members to his supporters as U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), stood by and laughed. Walker has never served in the military despite his recent false claims of having had a “military career.” “Hey, just think about it: Pronoun? In our military?” mocked Walker, 60, whose own son is gay. “How do you identify? In our military? These are war times. What happened to pushups?” hew asked as the crowd laughed. “Situps?” “‘Cause I …

Read More

An anonymous reader shares this report from the National Review: PayPal has backtracked on a published policy that would have fined users $2,500 for spreading "misinformation," claiming the update had gone out "in error." "An 'Acceptable Use Policy' notice recently went out in error that included incorrect information. PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy. Our teams are working to correct our policy pages. We're sorry for the confusion this has caused," a spokesperson told National Review in a written statement.... The policy update had appeared to authorize the company to pull a significant sum of money from the accounts of users who spread "misinformation," among other newly listed offenses.... Changes included prohibitions on "the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials" that "promote misinformation." While the prior policy already forbade "hate," "intolerance," and discrimination, the new one would have explicitly applied to specific "protected groups" and "individuals or groups based on protected characteristics...." The firm's current rulebook doesn't list these terms. It's unclear whether PayPal will also pull back these specific prohibitions on "discriminatory" language, or if it is only scrubbing the "misinformation" clause.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Now that the one son Republican Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker had publicly acknowledged as his own has thrown up his hands and abandoned dad's campaign, that campaign has gone even further off the rails than it was before. And it was never on the rails to begin with. It was maybe adjacent to some rails, maybe? Like, if the campaign rails were over here, then Walker's campaign would be the empty parking lot of an abandoned mall next to the tracks, with weeds growing through the pavement, and Walker's campaign would be leaning precariously into a dumpster in that parking lot, looking for old cassette tapes or something. I don't know, I haven't put a lot of thought into this.

What we do know is that the man the Republican establishment chose as its very best option to represent the Republican Party in Georgia hasn't been doing so great after news came to light that he had paid for a then-girlfriend's abortion, and had kept it from his family, and lied about it when it came to light, and kept lying even as the woman in question was revealed to be the mother of one of the kids he casually forgot to mention he had until reporters discovered them on their own. How has he been responding to the newest revelations? Not well.

Yeah, that's indeed the short version. You might keep an eye on fellow Republicans Tom Cotton and The Ghost Of Rick Scott as Herschel weaves his little tale of ... something? Is Herschel talking about what we all think he’s talking about?

This is why Republicans suck VERY VERY MUCH at writing children's books. Anytime a "family-values" abortion-paying-for secret-child-having repeatedly-held-gun-to-wife's-head Republican Senate candidate starts going on about livestock sex, things are going to go downhill quickly. There are very few campaign strategies that have, as bullet points, "and now you’re going to go out and tell the crowd a story about livestock sex." NO.

But the moral of this little story is ... what? Herschel imagines himself as the bull, right? And he got three women pregnant that we know of, and maybe there's three more we don't know about, but for Senate Republican candidates in Georgia the grass is always greener on the side of the fence with even more cows than that, so he's naturally going to go through barbed wire to look for them, and hey I think we are going to stop thinking about this right the hell now, because sweet and sour Jesus this is not the closing argument we want to be hearing from any would-be Republican senator past or present.

We do not want to hear about livestock sex from Tom Cotton, or from Mitch McConnell, or from anybody else. Not as a parable. Not as a free-form poem. Please stop talking about cow sex.

Walker did stop, but not before making everything even weirder than that.

See there, and you were beginning to wonder if he really was Senate material.

Moving on ...

Okay, so first he was a bull, then a dog, now he's a bear? Is the bear having sex too, or is that not specified? And he's both dog and bear now, some sort of freaky dog-bear hybrid? Can anyone explain the train of thought that gets us from there to "and that's why you should vote for me to be in the United States Senate, where I can write new tax laws or whatever?"

This is not how a campaign normally operates! This is not how parables operate! This is maybe how German folk tales usually go, but parables? Not really! Normally there are no candidates who climb up on stage to tell stories of sex-having mountain goats with a long history of head injuries, to give one inappropriate example out of many.

We're used to Republican politicians announcing that there are Too Many Trees These Days, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Whatshisname to this guy. We can get through that. We're used to Republican candidates who hide a history of just blood-curdling moral failures; hiding secret sex partners and the abortions you paid for is so commonplace it might as well be written into the Republican Party platform. You can be banned from local malls after becoming infamous as the town's most persistent sex pest, and we're even used to that.

Walker, though, seems intent on shooting the moon here. He's going to fill out every square of the Republican Scandal Bingo cards so that everyone wins a prize. He's running against a Democratic minister, no less, and one who has not yet become famous for telling stories about sex-having animals.

Stop it! Enough! This has all been very funny but for the love of God and biscuits, Walker campaign staff, get this man help instead of just going through the motions for a paycheck. Suggest he pursue alternate careers, maybe something in accounting. No petting zoos. No children's books. What about pumpkin farming, one of those guys that tries to grow the biggest pumpkin for Halloween, maybe he'd be interested in that? Some of them are even big enough to turn into boats; he could float around and pretend to be in the Navy.

RELATED STORIES:

Herschel Walker’s son blasts his dad over abortion denials, lies, and domestic violence

Woman that Herschel Walker denied knowing is the mother of one of his children

To the surprise of no one, Herschel Walker seems to be lying about his companies' charitable giving

Herschel Walker says trees are stealing your money. That's it. That's his whole plan

Since Dobbs, women have registered to vote in unprecedented numbers across the country, and the first person to dig into these stunning trends was TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier, who's our guest on this episode of The Downballot. Bonier explains how his firm gathers data on the electorate; why this surge is likely a leading indicator showing stepped-up enthusiasm among many groups of voters, including women, young people, and people of color; how we know these new registrants disproportionately lean toward Democrats; and what it all might mean for November.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: A spacecraft that plowed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles from Earth succeeded in shifting the orbit of the space rock, Nasa said on Tuesday, announcing the results of its first such test. The US space agency strategically launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test ("Dart") spacecraft into the path of the asteroid, thereby throwing it off course. Nasa hopes to be able to deflect any asteroid or comet that comes to pose a real threat to Earth. Dart altered the orbit of the Dimorphos asteroid by 32 minutes. Glaze said the minimum requirement for changing the orbital period was "really only 73 seconds." Last year, in a test that cost $325 million, another Dart spacecraft, roughly the size of a vending machine, was destroyed when it slammed into an asteroid 7m miles away, at 14,000mph.In a tweet, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, said: "Congratulations to the team at Nasa for successfully altering the orbit of an asteroid. The Dart mission marks the first time humans have changed the motion of a celestial body in space, demonstrating technology that could one day be used to protect Earth." The scientist and educator Bill Nye said: "We're celebrating ... because a mission like this could save the world." The Nasa administrator, the former astronaut and Democratic Florida senator Bill Nelson, said: "We showed the world that Nasa is serious as a defender of this planet." Lori Glaze, director of Nasa's planetary division, said: "Let's all just take a moment to soak this in. We're all here this afternoon because for the first time ever, humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary body."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Republicans love nothing more than to show off their power by stomping down on vulnerable and marginalized communities, especially if they think it’ll translate to more outrage (and more votes) around election season. Daily Kos has continued to cover the ways conservatives have rallied around an anti-queer platform in recent years, with everything from ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bills to bathroom bills to anti-health care efforts. And as we continue to cover, the false hysteria over trans girls participating in girls' sports continues to be a big one. 

Drag shows have also come under attack in an organized fashion. Daily Kos has covered instances of public libraries facing threats and harassment over hosting Drag Queen story hours (which include, as one might imagine, people in drag reading children’s books to children). At points, protesters have actually gathered at libraries to intimidate families. It’s horrifying.

Thanks to Republican State Rep. Chris Todd, folks attending Jackson TN Pride (held in Jackson, Tennessee) had to show ID to prove they were at least 18 in order to attend a drag show, as reported by NBC News. In addition to requiring IDs, the entire event was moved indoors. Because stirring outrage and fear around drag is somehow a priority when the nation continues to face the COVID-19 pandemic, gun violence, surges in white supremacy and literal fascism, among other things. 

RELATED: Mother of trans girl says she's being bullied at school after using girls' locker room for sports

“I continue to hear from Madison Countians APPALLED at the possibility of a drag queen show in Conger Park,” Todd wrote in a Facebook post on Sept. 17, adding that state laws stop “adult cabarets” from being within 1,000 feet of places of worship, residences, or public parks. 

Mind you, Pride was held in the same location (Conger Park) in multiple years past without an issue. When asked why he wasn’t up in arms then, he said he “didn’t know” it was happening. 

Even still, Jackson Mayor Scott Conger did have a meeting about the issue where Todd, as well as church officials, Jackson Pride Committee members, and others gathered to discuss. Todd insists he heard from constituents who also opposed the event being held at the park.

From here, event organizers agreed to hold the event at a nearby location indoors instead of at the park. Then Todd pushed for that to be shut down as well, arguing that it’s still within 1,000 feet of a First United Methodist Church. Because Republicans are incapable of any compromise that doesn’t involve them getting their way, of course.

Eventually, Pride organizers were able to keep the event going by adding the ID check for the drag show. Todd took to Facebook again after this, insisting the event organizers needed to admit they were “way out of line” from the beginning. Because, again, Republicans gloat and push even when they’ve already gotten their way.

Some drag shows are meant for adults, and that’s okay. The same can be said for many comedy, improv, and other live theater productions. And some drag is perfectly family-friendly and, specifically, kid-friendly; it just depends, and that’s fine. Organizers clearly wanted to have an inclusive event where queer youth and allies could feel safe and celebrated, and Republicans just needed to insist on isolating and excluding young people. 

The United States' relationship with oil-producing Saudi Arabia has never risen to the status of "good," and soured considerably after the Saudi monarchy's murder of a Washington Post correspondent who criticized the regime. While it does depend somewhat on whether the current American president is or is not a sociopath, murdering journalists is allegedly something we still take quite seriously in our own diplomatic relations.

Last week's decision from OPEC Plus to cut world oil production, a move that boosts Vladimir Putin's campaign to produce an energy crisis in Europe of sufficient scope to force nations to reconsider the sanctions against Russia for their murderous invasion of Ukraine, is being met with particular fury. As OPEC nations are already underproducing, actual effects on world oil markets may turn out to be modest—but it is still seen as an explicit attempt by Saudi Arabia to assist fellow cartel member Russia in its war of conquest. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Bob Menendez released a fuming response calling for the U.S. to "freeze all aspects of our cooperation" with the Saudi regime, including arms sales.

Now the Biden White House is signaling they are equally out of patience. As reported by The New York Times, National Security Council strategic communications coordinator John Kirby put a new public emphasis on that with comments on CNN, saying that President Biden has "been very clear that this is a relationship that we need to continue to re-evaluate."

When it comes to punitive measures being discussed, including the imposition of an arms embargo, "the timeline's now and I think he’s going to be willing to start to have those conversations right away," said Kirby.

The White House signaling that they're going to be "re-evaluating" the relationship between the United States and the authoritarian Saudi regime is a significant statement. It also comes after a series of actions by Saudi Arabia that put the interests of Russia and other bad actors above its alleged friendship with the United States. In addition to cooperatively boosting pressure against European sanctions against Russia's energy exports, the OPEC Plus attempt to yet again ratchet up oil prices is being widely seen as an attempt to tip American elections against Democrats in favor of the more dictatorship-friendly Republican Party.

It is not exactly a close-held secret that the Saudi regime would rather have Trumpites in power in America than the opposition. An absurd and brazenly political decision to kick a few billion dollars toward Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, a golf partnership that saw a Saudi tournament hosted at a Trump golf resort even as another Trump club was raided for above-top-secret national security documents Trump spirited out of the White House after his election loss, the eagerness of Trump's appointed Republicans to boost Saudi nuclear capabilities—the Saudi affinity for Trump's crooked authoritarian-backing version of politics has not been hidden.

The whole of the Saudi-American relationship is a hot mess, and crooked from its founding. Part of current U.S. administration ire is, alleges the Times, because after Biden went as far as to pay a diplomatic visit to Saudi Arabia last July, "American officials said at the time that they had an understanding with Saudi Arabia that it would increase oil production in the fall and thus lower gasoline prices heading into the crucial congressional elections."

That stated link between advocating for lower consumer gas prices and the "crucial congressional elections" may be one drawn by the Times or one stated explicitly by American diplomats, but in any event Biden took a considerable political risk in his attempt to patch up relations only to have the Saudi government rebuff those moves in favor of assisting Putin. It's entirely possible that Biden is now, to use the relevant diplomatic jargon here, now extremely pissed off on a personal level at the Saudi monarchy's consistent siding against American interests.

Kirby's public announcement that the White House was indeed "re-evaluating" U.S. security arrangements with the Saudi government might only be a way to make the Biden administration's anger readily apparent. But it's more likely that Biden and his advisers see Saudi attempts to further constrict energy supplies so as to squeeze Europe as a non-ignorable attack on U.S. and European interests, and sees no way around an in-kind response.

Biden is known as an affable diplomat, but Dark Brandon is willing to cut a dude.

We'll soon know. Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Rep. Ro Khanna have introduced a new bill freezing all U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia for one year, including "spare and repair parts" and "technical and logistical support services." That's an extraordinary move. Will the Biden administration support it, or use it to propose a slightly less-strict embargo, or use it as cudgel to provide a few concessions from the authoritarian regime?

The Saudi regime has been brazenly boosting Trump and Putin's ambitions over democracies here and elsewhere. After the new White House attempted a risky reset that went nowhere, the current U.S. diplomatic team may have evolved past the notion that they can work things out with the bonesaw brigade. Good. The United States doesn't need these kinds of "friends."

After an eruption of even more scandals among Republican Senate candidates, FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich returns to The Downballot this week to discuss the effect these sorts of scandals can have on competitive races; whether Democrats stand a chance to keep the House; and the different ways pollsters create likely voter models.

We need your help to write 10,000,000 letters to infrequent but Democratic-leaning prospective voters in key congressional districts and Senate swing states this election, urging them to exercise their right to vote. Sign up with Vote Forward and join the most popular and effective Get Out the Vote (GOTV) activity in Daily Kos history.

Read 31 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Revelations about McCarthy's Jan. 6 coverup for Trump highlight the danger of GOP control.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Siemens Gamesa's 14-222 DD offshore wind turbine prototype has, according to the Spanish-German wind giant today, set a world record for the most power output by a single wind turbine in a 24-hour period: 359 megawatt-hours. This would be enough energy, according to the company, for a mid-sized electric vehicle -- think a Tesla Model 3 -- to drive around 1.12 million miles (1.8 million km). Siemens Gamesa's huge wind turbine achieved this power output milestone only 10 months after it produced its first electricity and delivered it to the grid at the test center in Osterild, Denmark. The SG 14-222 DD is a 14 megawatt (MW) offshore wind turbine with a capacity of up to 15 MW with Power Boost. It features a 222-meter (728 feet) diameter rotor, 108-meter-long (354-feet-long) B108 blades that are cast in a single piece and can now be recycled, and a swept area of 39,000 square meters (419,792 square feet). The SG 14-222 DD can provide enough energy to power around 18,000 households annually. In June, Siemens Gamesa was awarded a firm order for 60 of its SG 14-222 DD offshore wind turbines, which will be installed at the 882-megawatt (MW) Moray West offshore wind farm in Scotland. It will be the first installation of this model. Siemens Gamesa writes: "By increasing the rotor diameter to 222 meters with 108 meter-long blades, the SG 14-222 DD delivers more than 25% [annual energy production] AEP compared to its predecessor."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By Brian VanHooker Published: October 10th, 2022

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Thanks for reading, geeks. It's a book like no other, and I hope you give it a chance.

Today's News:

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Suddenly worried I'm antagonizing a widespread tri-boob community.

Today's News:

Bonus update coming because I have A NEW BOOK.

Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville held nothing back at a recent rally for former President Donald Trump. He was talking about crime, but that was simply code for Black Americans as criminals.

With just a week to go before early elections in the midterms, the GOP has pulled out all the stops. Nothing seems to be off limits, and crime appears to be the hot-button issue to rally their base. When it comes to talking about crime, they really mean Black people, who they love to claim are villains.

Tuberville's rant targeted the Democrats, who he claimed aren’t just “soft on crime” but “pro-crime,” he said at the Minden, Nevada, Trump rally on Saturday. Then he went after the Dems who support reparations for Black American descendants of slavery.

RELATED STORY: ‘Call a crackhead’: John Kennedy throws out the dog whistle, goes full GOP in new racist ad

“[Dems] want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that,” the first-term senator said.

As the Associated Press reports, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) found that overall crime rates have actually gone down since 2020, although the murder rate went up 29% during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, a press release from the FBI in 2021 found that over half of known offenders are white. So let’s cut the shit GOP: You’re not really concerned about crime in this nation, you’re worried about staying in power, and you’re blowing the racist dog whistle to do it.

In an effort to get Republican Adam Laxalt elected and unseat Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, Tuberville made the connection between crime and criminals (Black Americans).

Before turning to politics, as The Philadelphia Inquirer reports, Tuberville made millions in college football. While he was at the University of Cincinnati, he earned over $2 million annually off the backs of Black athletes who were paid nothing. Sound familiar? Like maybe the American industry of slavery?

Tom Moon, a columnist for Alabama Political Reporter, wrote on Twitter, “I mean, I’ve watched and listened to A LOT of old George Wallace speeches. You’d be hard pressed to find many that were worse than this. In 2022. Just disgusting.”

But Tuberville isn’t the only Republican beating the racist drum: Louisiana’s blustery turncoat with a fake Southern drawl and a penchant for MAGA election conspiracies, Sen. John Kennedy, had no issues in a recent campaign ad where he called out crime and blamed “woke leaders” and the criminals he called “crackhead[s].”

“A mom should not have to look over her shoulder when she's pumping gas. I voted against the early release of violent criminals, and I opposed defunding the police. Look, if you hate cops just because they're cops, the next time you get in trouble, call a crackhead.”

Kennedy’s ad is something straight out of the Republican playbook used most famously by President George H. W. Bush. When Bush campaigned in 1988, an ad he ran against his Democratic rival Michael Dukakis meant to convey Dukakis as soft on crime, featured convicted murderer Willie Horton.  

Bush alleged Dukakis was a politician who supported furloughs for prisoners or weekend pass allowances—specifically the kind of pass that allowed Horton to kidnap a couple, then stab the man and rape his girlfriend. The ad set the tone for the “tough on crime” era, per The Takeaway.

Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson also turned to crime as an issue in his campaign while running against Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a Black Democrat. According to the Inquirer, Johnson ran an ad calling Barnes “different” and “dangerous” and sent out a mailer with a darker-looking Barnes just to make sure voters got the point.

The Inquirer additionally reports that the GOP has jumped in on the Pennsylvania race, implying that U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman’s tattoos, which mark his time as mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, are possibly gang-affiliated.

RELATED STORY: The U.S. will never move forward until we acknowledge our past and criminalize its denial

The US Department of Energy has proposed regulations to financially reward cybersecurity modernization at power plants by offering rate deals for everything from buying new hardware to paying for outside help. The Register reports: In a notice of proposed rulemaking published earlier this week (which nullified a similar 2021 plan), the DoE said the time was right "to establish rules for incentive-based rate treatments" for utilities making investments in cybersecurity technology. The DoE said these included products and services, and information like plans, policies, procedures and other info related to cybersecurity tech. [...] In addition to stimulating voluntary security improvements, the proposed policy also encourages utilities to join cyber threat information sharing programs, and mandates regular reports for the duration of incentives. The DoE's proposal includes a long list of things it said would be eligible for incentive-based rate treatments. While it's too long to include here, the DoE's language about what it will allow means it could essentially include anything that could "materially improve cybersecurity," be that a product, service or info-sharing program. The DoE said that hardware incentives would have a five-year depreciation period, while activities would cease to be incentivized once they become mandatory. As for how the rewards would be applied, the proposal specifies two methods: A return on equity (RoE) of 200 base points (2 percent) that would be applied to transmission rates, and a cost-recovery deferral that would allow them to amortize equipment purchased and treated as a regulatory asset.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OMFG. 

The road side is collapsed, the rail side will collapse soon. 

This is the bridge that connects Russia with Crimea, and it’s the main way of resupply for the southern front. It’s also a symbol of Russian strength and annexation of Ukrainian territory. This is devastating to Russia, and on the day after Vladimir Putin’s birthday, it’s f’n perfect. 

So many questions, such as, does Ukraine have ATACMS—long-range rockets fired from HIMARS and MLRS launchers? Or is this some other wonder weapon we didn’t yet know existed? We’ll update as information comes in. 

Republicans love their phony bugaboos. Whether it’s graduate-level courses being taught in kindergarten, migrant caravans shoving old women out of the way at the A&P to score the last marble rye, or foreign drug cartels handing out fentanyl to trick-or-treaters for Squad-knows-what reason, the GOP is great at distracting you from the hell demons feasting on your viscera all day, every day, like so much Laffy Taffy.

But if there’s a suspected Russian agent in the White House doing things only a Russian agent would do—well, never mind. We’ll just see how it plays out. How about that, patriots?

In yet another tardy tell-all on the bag of moldering mystery dicks that was the Trump administration—this one titled Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump—POLITICO’s Rachael Bade and The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian detail the mental gymnastics congressional Republicans went through during Trump’s first impeachment, all in order to make him seem vaguely not-guilty. Yet according to no less an authority on evil than Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, every single Republican senator actually thought Trump was corrupt to the core. (Or to whatever passes as a Trump “core.” Truth is, all you’re likely to find in there is nougat. Or maybe an old, glitchy CPU from a Furby.)

If you think back to 2,137 hair-on-fire Donald Trump scandals ago, you’ll recall that Trump withheld vital military aid to Ukraine during a shooting war in order to blackmail its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, into announcing an investigation into Joe Biden—who, if you’ll recall from 1,311 hair-on-fire Trump scandals ago, forced Trump to either go on a feral crusade against our democracy or retreat inside his own neck wattle in abject shame. (As you may recall, Trump opted for the former.)

The question at the time was whether Trump had engaged in a quid pro quo to force favors from his Ukrainian counterpart. It was obvious he had, of course, but Republicans weren’t going to give up on their fantasies that easily. After all, they had a country to ruin, and very little time in which to ruin it.

RELATED: Once again, New York Times reporters betray the public interest for the sake of a book deal

According to Bade and Demirjian, Republicans were so unimpressed with Trump’s lawyers—who included legendary law professor and Jeff Epstein pal Alan Dershowitz, who’d argued that Trump could do anything he wanted if he thought it would get him elected—they felt the need, as putative “jurors,” to help out Trump’s defense team.

HuffPost:

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) told Trump’s team afterward to fire Dershowitz on the spot, while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) warned them to switch tactics.

“Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one,” Cruz reportedly said at one point, contradicting what Republicans were saying publicly about the charges at the time.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also fumed at Trump’s legal team after they fumbled responding to a senator’s question about calling new witnesses. Trump’s attorneys said that it was simply too late to do so, a line Graham worried would lose Republican votes.

In fact, after that fumble, Graham reportedly opined, “We are FUCKED. We are FUCKED!” as he walked into the GOP cloakroom.

According to the book, even as Republican senators balked at publicly discussing the hearings, telling the media that they needed to remain neutral as “jurors,” Trump’s incompetent legal team forced them to act in private. So then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell twisted arms, ultimately convincing Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander to vote against hearing further witnesses. Particularly at issue was likely testimony from former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who’d claimed in a book of his own that Trump had told him his scheme to withhold military aid from Ukraine was definitely part of a quid pro quo.

So why the reluctance to convict a guy whom they all knew was guilty? Because Republicans weren’t quite done handing out goodies to wealthy donors, stealing Supreme Court seats, or generally terrorizing anyone with a working womb.

“This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” McConnell reportedly told his charges. “It has always been about Nov. 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

GOP Senate leaders weren’t just involved in fixing the vote, of course. They were also forced to coach the Trump team in the fine art of not looking like overt criminals. 

RELATED: Maggie Haberman: Just another person 'willing to let democracy die on the altar of a book deal'

The book recounts an episode in which McConnell’s top legal counsel, Andrew Ferguson, wrote out an answer to a question Republicans wanted to ask the Trump team during the trial. It was meant to establish a B.S. line of argument that Bolton’s testimony would be moot.

The group gathered around a laptop to weigh in as Ferguson typed. “Assuming for argument’s sake that John Bolton were to testify in the light most favorable to the allegations…isn’t it true that the allegations still would not rise to the level of an impeachable offense? They agreed to ask. “And that therefore…his testimony would add nothing to this case?”

But the senators were worried. Trump’s lawyers had already proven themselves unreliable, even when lobbed the easiest softball questions. “Is Trump’s team going to answer this the right way?” Graham asked.

“I will go down there and tell them to answer it the right way,” Ferguson vowed.

Way to go, “jury”! You saved this monster from himself! Good thing he didn’t go on to incite any insurrections or steal any top secret nuclear documents or anything. Crisis averted! The republic is saved!

When the history of this era is written, Cruz’s quote needs to be italicized, underlined and, ideally, tattooed on every congressional Republican’s forehead. Because it’s the only quote you need to understand the modern GOP.

In fact, their motto might as well be “Yes, we know better—but fuck you anyway, America!” It would be the first honest sentence we’ve heard out of them in years. We’re so close to Nov. 8, and our chance to expand our razor-thin Senate majority. Can you help us keep McConnell, Cruz, Graham, and their ilk in the minority with a donation of just $3 or more to our Senate slate?

Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments