James.galbraith

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TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Ron DeSantis gave a warm welcome to millions of spring breakers descending on the state, touting earlier this month that “there are no lockdowns in Florida.” But the rule-averse Republican left local city leaders hamstrung in their efforts to control unruly crowds and the spread of the virus.

DeSantis early this month abolished fines on people and businesses for violating local pandemic orders, launching his latest push to convince pandemic-weary tourists that Florida is safe. The governor had already rolled back restrictions on bars and restaurants — even as new coronavirus variants were predicted to drive up the rate of new Covid infections through spring break.

The DeSantis ban on fines came to the forefront over the weekend in Miami Beach, where a surge of spring break visitors filled the island city well beyond its capacity. Officials in Miami Beach, which relies heavily on tourism dollars, were forced to impose an 8 p.m. curfew on the city’s entertainment district in the middle of its most lucrative season of the year after police clashed with party-goers.

“DeSantis rolled out the red carpet for visitors, and he left us to deal with the aftermath,” said Miami Beach City Commissioner David Richardson, a Democrat. “People call it spring break and I correct them — this is a high impact period.”

A thriving economy is a huge selling point for Republicans, and DeSantis is already using his pandemic track record to stage for a grueling reelection campaign next year and possibly a 2024 presidential run. DeSantis, a conservative darling and close ally of Donald Trump, earned praise from Republicans for resisting lockdowns and pressing to keep kids in school — but more than 32,000 Floridians have died from the pandemic and this week the state became the first in the country to have more than 1,000 cases of Covid variants.

DeSantis kept Florida open as some Republican governors in neighboring Sunbelt states continued to enforce pandemic-era restrictions. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey extended her statewide mask order to April 9. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey also rolled back capacity restrictions on bars, restaurants and gyms, but several cities and counties still have face mask orders in place.

Florida over the past three weeks has only seen a slight increase in newly reported Covid-19 infections. The seven-day average rate of new infections as of Tuesday was 5.84 percent, which is up from 5.73 percent on March 2, according to an analysis of daily reports published by the Florida Department of Health.

Democrats in the state, determined to bounce back after Republicans flipped seats in the state Legislature last year, are also capitalizing on the Spring break confusion to hammer the governor. Broward County Mayor Steve Geller, a Democrat, this week accused DeSantis of ignoring his requests for help in planning for the crowds of tourists that were anticipated in January. Geller ended up consulting with federal health agencies, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control as Broward County brokered a spring break enforcement plan with the City of Fort Lauderdale.

“Gov. DeSantis told us we can’t fine the bars, and then nothing,” Geller said, adding that just like the governor, Broward and Fort Lauderdale are eager to revive the economy after more than a year of uncertainty that forced many bars and restaurants to close.

“We had to do something to try and help, so I started working with the CDC,” Geller said.

Democrat Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings also took matters into his own hands after he said demand for the Covid-19 vaccine had dropped at a vaccination site in the county convention center for several weeks. Demings dropped the age limit at the convention center to 40 even though the latest executive order signed by DeSantis limits shots to people who are 50 years old and older. Staffers at the site filled 7,000 appointments in 13 minutes, Demings told reporters during a Monday news conference.

DeSantis said last week that Demings’ plan to drop the age was not his decision, though Demings said he’s not worried about the backlash from Tallahassee.

“Those are just words he’s using, you know, so we will move beyond that,” Demings said. “This is about the life, health and safety of individuals in our community.”

But the most dramatic news came over the weekend, when this year’s revelers brought guns, incited street brawls and made everyday life impossible for Miami Beach’s roughly 90,000 residents. Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said the city was happy when DeSantis left emergency restrictions such as beach closures and mask mandates to the localities. But, Gelber said, DeSantis also failed to consider the consequences of bringing millions of visitors to one of the few warm weather vacation destinations in the country.

“Well, I'm not a fan of the way he's handled this,” Gelber said. “When you have a sense of the chaos here, no one — not one of the visitors — are thinking about wearing a mask.”

When asked about the lax Spring Break support from the state, DeSantis spokesperson Meredith Beatrice said the governor’s office sent Florida Highway Patrol troopers and Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents to Miami and Miami Beach.

Gelber said Miami Beach ended up using a local code enforcement and an 8 p.m. emergency curfew order to restore order after the weekend’s mayhem, though local community leaders criticized the authorities for cracking down on the predominantly Black crowd and ignoring their white counterparts. The two causeways connecting the city with the mainland are also restricted at night to local traffic.

“I don’t know what else we could have done but close everything down, which is what we did,” Gelber said. “It’s not something you typically do, which is shut the causeways and create a curfew.

“It’s so unusual because it’s all we had available to us,” Gelber said.

This New York Times report on the continuing antics of Wisconsin's Sen. Ron Johnson is actually ... good? As in, very good?

As unsettling as that is, after the paper's four-year treatment of Donald Trump's blatant lying and propaganda campaigns as political curiosities to be analyzed for effectiveness and technique, in running down the laundry list of Johnson's recent and oft-contradictory false claims, reporters Trip Gabriel and Reid J. Epstein do an effective job of contextualizing Johnson's behavior and conveying the what of the story that more rote daily reporting regularly (and sometimes pedantically, and usually proudly) ignores.

Gabriel and Epstein do not merely repeat Johnson's latest claims, nor do they brush responsibility off with parenthetical fact checks of each. They interview Johnson, but do not allow him to run their reporting off its rails by treating him with unwarranted deference. Instead, they find the story behind the story—the information that the public most needs to know, defended in detail and with its conclusions intact.

Sen. Ron Johnson "has become the Republican Party’s foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation," report Gabriel and Epstein. An "all-access purveyor of misinformation on serious issues," one who uses his powerful perch to mislead the American public on critical subjects and in dire ways.

He is a propagandist. He is a liar. The what that the public most needs to know and that journalism has the most responsibility to convey is not the occurrence of each individual lie, set apart from the others and rebutted by fact in whatever detail a journalist or editor believes it necessary to muster. The what is that a powerful senator who acted as chair of the Senate's Homeland Security Committee is a serial propagandist, a habitual if not compulsive liar who engages in fraud against the public with regularity and with clearly political intent.

The what is not that Ron Johnson has told lies. The what is that Ron Johnson's willingness to pass on hoax after hoax to American voters is a threat to the nation's democracy. Such propaganda seeks to nullify the voice of voters by so muddling the information available to them that they cannot make judgments about the successes or failures of their representatives at all. It is all noise, and voting becomes not an exercise of public will but of the effectiveness of competing strategies for gaslighting them.

Johnson's lies are all to a purpose. He lies to boost his party's ideological stances—even when those stances were merely blundered upon, as with his continued boosting of hydroxychloroquine as anti-COVID treatment, still repeating a damaging Trump claim from the early days that Trump himself only latched onto as one of a list of supposed quick-fix cures Trump vowed would end the pandemic in short order. Johnson’s efforts to fuel skepticism as to the efficacy of the vaccines now available, by contrast, are part of a brickheaded campaign to sow distrust in all things non-Republican, be they in science or in government. It is the same for climate change, and for his backing of Russian-backed conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the Biden family; there is no invented fiction that he will not endorse in service to a long-term partisan campaign demonizing non-conservative, non-Republican figures as something close to vampires.

Similarly, he lies to absolve his own party and ideological tent from even proven violent acts, as with his incessant new explanations as to how the violent insurrection that targeted lawmakers inside the Capitol—which resulted in well over 100 injured police officers, multiple deaths, and chants about what the crowd intended to do to those it was hunting—was not violent, or that the violence was caused by non-conservatives who had secretly infiltrated the conservative crowd, or take-your-pick. It does not seem to matter to him that each of these lies is provably false on their face. He continues, undaunted, even as profiles of those arrested for the violence paint each as rabid far-right partisan.

There was a point when it seemed possible that Johnson was lying so prolifically because he was genuinely stupid. The current pattern seems to put such thoughts to rest, however; he is lying about things that he himself has seen with his own eyes, and about things that have been so prolifically debunked that he, an alleged United States senator with his own dedicated staff, could not possibly still be confused about in good faith. The man is a liar and a provocateur, nothing more.

That the Times piece makes a comparison to professional propagandist Sen. Joe McCarthy, who made a brief career out of defrauding the nation as means of self-promotional and authoritarian-premised warfare, is also of note. Indeed, Ron Johnson is of the same mold. His methodology is to accuse his enemies of all manner of things, using the weight of his office and committee positions to give merit to constant flights of conspiratorial fancy, and to bellow about oppression when called out. Like McCarthy, Johnson has also gone so far in his fictions that he is no longer known primarily as ideological zealot, but for his insufferable dishonesty.

So yes, then, this is indeed a big news story. A sitting U.S. senator is a serial propagandist, an eager liar who incessantly spreads misinformation as his political weapon. It is a story that the daily tit-for-tat sniping about each individual lie dodges, if only for expediency. Note that it still makes no value judgment about the morality of Johnson's pattern of lies—but it does identify them as a pattern, and factually conveys the man's status as a "purveyor of misinformation on serious subjects."

This is not editorializing. It's identifying the true story behind the partisan sniping. A CNN story from a day prior identified Johnson's latest false claims about the supposed peacefulness of violent insurrectionists and was willing to identify Johnson's motive—to "downplay the seriousness" of the pro-Trump insurrection—but went no further, even allowing Johnson to get the last word in with still more false claims aimed at Black Lives Matter protests. But it did not identify Johnson as a serial fabricator, despite that being the most vital information to convey.

If Johnson is spreading false information with one claim on one day, it is of middling value at best to broadcast that falsehood even with fact checking. Was he misinformed, or was it intentional? We have no way to know, because that vital context has been carved out and tossed into a bucket of other entrails deemed unfit for presentation. If Johnson has put forward enormous quantities of disinformation not only in his claims about the insurrection, but in myriad other partisan battles, then it becomes impossible to believe he is merely mistaken this time around, in these specific statements.

The good news is that Ron Johnson's reputation for pushing malevolent misinformation is now impossible to ignore, and each of his most recent attempts at propaganda-peddling has proven considerably less successful than it would have been if—again, reminiscent of Joe McCarthy—the bellowing balloon was able to muster a few scraps of self-control. In a Washington Post piece, Greg Sargent uses the Times report to further delve into the grotesquery of Johnson's insurrection denialisms and the need to remove him as part of the "deradicalization" of propaganda-reliant Republicanism.

That is where the divide between journalism and editorial belongs, or at least far closer to it. Whether Johnson should be removed from office by voters for being a pustule of misinformation and falsehoods is up for editorial judgment, but reporting that he is a serial liar who uses propaganda to advance false narratives is on firm journalistic ground.

If an elected official, or a dozen of them, or 100 of them, have engaged in a years-long pattern to misinform the public, gaslighting them about some of the most vital issues of the day until even the integrity of our elections themselves is seen by ideologues as a truth that can be successfully challenged if only enough misinformation and enough violence can be brought to bear against it, it is front-page news. The Trump White House operated from its first day to its last day as a source of constant, relentless propaganda, but the national press ignored the ramifications of such behavior as if they had been put under a spell. It is catastrophic to democracy. It is inherently authoritarian. It is a behavior a free country cannot possibly abide, not as measure of morality but as matter of structural integrity.

Ron Johnson is a propagandist who manufactures false claims against his enemies and distorts plain truths in order to paper over the errors or corruption of his allies. It is a form of corruption that strikes at the nation's very heart, and it deserves more press attention as something more than filler or sideshow.

After two mass shootings within a week killed 18 people, the evenly divided Senate is no closer to agreement on any gun control legislation that could respond to the devastation.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is vowing to force a vote on an expansive proposal on background checks for gun buyers, but three critical swing votes from both parties are resistant. Talks are ongoing on a bipartisan strategy that might steer gun legislation past political tripwires, but it's far from clear whether those negotiations could yield the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

The forecast for progress, then, looked bleak the day after a gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., and one week after another gunman killed eight people at spas in Atlanta, Ga. Six of the people killed in Atlanta were women of Asian descent.

Although Schumer has promised a vote on House-passed background checks legislation, it's not even clear if Senate Democrats will get their entire caucus on board: West Virginia's Joe Manchin, the most conservative member in the caucus, said Tuesday he opposes it. Manchin worked with Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) on legislation to expand background checks to commercial sales that fell short of 60 votes in 2013.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of two Republicans still in office who voted for the Manchin-Toomey proposal, said that she had yet to look at the House bill but that it appears “very broad.”

Toomey agreed, telling reporters that “I don’t think the House has passed anything that can pass the Senate."

The Pennsylvania Republican, who's leaving Congress after next year, declined to elaborate on his background checks conversations with other senators. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who partnered with Toomey and Manchin in 2019 on crafting another background checks proposal during the Trump administration, said he is talking to Republicans but that he sees no reason to make major changes to the House-passed bill.

“The Manchin-Toomey compromise was negotiated with the [National Rifle Association]" in 2013, Murphy said, adding that Democrats shouldn’t settle for anything less than universal background checks, which received bipartisan support in the House. “I don’t know that the House is going to live with anything short of expanding background checks.”

While Schumer did not specify when the Senate would consider the House-passed background checks bill, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing Tuesday on solutions to gun violence. Some Senate Republicans have previously suggested they could be open to smaller proposals like so-called red flag laws, which allow authorities to limit a person’s access to guns in the event of an imminent threat to others.

The red flag proposal appeared to garner some momentum in 2019, following tragic shootings that year in Texas and Ohio. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have proposed legislation to incentivize red flag laws.

“These aren’t people buying guns at a gun show. These are people that are passing background checks because they don’t have a criminal history until they do,” Rubio said Tuesday, adding that he wants to see the gun debate “focus more on identifying people like this and preventing them from harming themselves or others.”

But several Senate Republicans questioned whether red flag laws provide sufficient due process for the gun buyers affected. And it’s not clear whether a narrower measure on that issue would appease Democrats who have spent years calling for broader change to the nation's gun laws.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) suggested that there are “couple of areas” where Democrats and Republicans could make progress. Among them, he said, is his bill with Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) that would require federal authorities to notify state and local law enforcement if someone tries to purchase a gun and fails a background check.

Blumenthal, who has yet to reintroduce his red-flag bill with Graham this Congress, suggested that Democrats shouldn’t necessarily take an all-or-nothing approach.

“I think we should aim for a comprehensive set of measures, but we may have to take it piece by piece. And that’s probably what works best this session,” Blumenthal said, advising Democrats to stay open to deals while seeking “as much as we can," including the ability to impose emergency orders against gun buyers who raise alarms.

In addition to calling for a vote on universal background checks, Schumer took the first steps Tuesday toward potential Senate consideration of a measure from Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) that addresses the rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans amid the coronavirus pandemic. Hirono's bill would designate a point person at the Department of Justice to expedite review of cases. In addition, the Senate could potentially consider a bill from Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to combat domestic terrorism and white supremacy.

Texas along with its border with Mexico was ground zero for some of the previous administration’s most inhumane anti-immigrant and anti-asylum policies targeting children and their families. El Paso is where that administration “piloted” family separation, the policy that would result in the state-sanctioned kidnapping of thousands of children. Nearly four years after that piloting, kids are still separated from their families. 

Thousands of asylum-seekers also languished in a squalid border camp across the border from Brownsville, pushed out under that administration’s inhumane “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forced vulnerable people to wait out their U.S. immigration court dates in dangerous conditions. The suffering was always there, but only now is Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott feigning concern—and certainly not about any of those humanitarian disasters.

In addition to adopting a white supremacist trope falsely accusing asylum-seekers of COVID-19 superspreading, Mother Jones reports that Abbott is responding to unaccompanied children arriving to the U.S. in search of safety and protection by deploying 1,000 officers to the border, including Texas Rangers. “Abbott said these interviews will identify victims of human trafficking, but Melissa Lopez, an attorney at Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services in El Paso, questioned the timing of so-called Operation Lonestar,” the report said.

“I think it’s highly hypocritical of Gov. Abbott to be suddenly concerned with the humanitarian situation at the border,” Lopez said according to the report, noting his lack of concern prior to noon on Jan. 20, 2021. “At no point was there ever concern for their safety, for their dignity. And suddenly, there’s a ‘crisis at the border,’ and we need to be concerned, and we’re going to start investigating human trafficking, as if human trafficking is something new.”

KSAT reports that in recent remarks, Abbott falsely claimed that “President Biden’s reckless open border policies have created a humanitarian crisis,” which he said “is enriching the cartels, smugglers, and human traffickers who often prey on and abuse unaccompanied minors.”

Some fact checks: The reality is that the Stephen Miller-pushed Title 42 policy, which advocates have strongly urged the Biden administration to end, is still blocking adult asylum-seekers. Human rights advocates also condemned Remain in Mexico as the policy “adding to cartel profits,” with one kidnapped asylum-seeker forced to Mexico saying “one of his captors told him the cartel had been hiring,” Human Rights Watch said last year. “Since the United States is deporting so many through here, we are capturing them and that has meant more work,” Human Rights Watch said his captor told him. “We’re saturated.” Biden has since begun to wind down that policy. But Abbott wasn’t so concerned during its duration, was he?

Mother Jones also reports the disturbing, anti-Mexican history of the Texas Rangers. Tim Murphy wrote last year that “[t]he Texas Rangers were vicious enforcers of white power” who in the early 20th century “instigated a reign of terror in which between 300 and several thousand Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans were killed.” Murphy wrote “[t]he Rangers have been portrayed in popular culture as icons of law and order.” 

In a recent press conference, El Paso Rep. Veronica Escobar and local leaders echoed Lopez and pressed on the urgent need to shift away from aggressive militarization that has become all too common in the borderlands. "The emphasis is putting more resources to treat people humanely, rather than use resources to militarize the border," Border Network for Human Rights executive director Fernando García said according to El Paso Times. "The migrants that are running for their lives, and running from situations that are untenable for them, are not running because it's an easy journey or because it is their first choice—this is their last choice," Escobar said.

During a Spanish-language interview with Univision’s Jorge Ramos, Rep. Escobar said that roughly half of unaccompanied children coming to the U.S. have parents already here and that they can be released to by the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement. The Biden administration has also recently announced new guidance that should speed up the safe release of unaccompanied children who have parents or relatives already here.

Rep. Escobar also recently invited House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to meet with local advocates, but he ignored that invitation because his sole purpose in going to the border was to pull off a stunt. “It is time that Texas leaders embrace and actually identify ways that they can help and support children that are coming, support families that are seeking asylum, and facilitate the lives of immigrants that have been here and contributing to the country,” Reform Immigration for Texas Alliance’s Adriana Cadena said according to Mother Jones.

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Not even measures supported by 90 percent of Americans can get a hearing.

Facebook could have prevented more than 10bn pageviews of prominent misinformation-spreading accounts in the US if it had acted sooner in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, a new report has claimed [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. Financial Times: The social media giant took a number of eleventh-hour steps to combat misinformation ahead of November's highly polarised election, such as demoting some misinformation superspreaders and blocking new political advertisements. However according to the US-based non-profit activism group Avaaz, if the platform had tweaked its algorithm and moderation policies in March last year, instead of waiting until October, it would have prevented an estimated 10.1bn additional pageviews on the 100 top-performing pages it classified as repeat spreaders of misinformation. The list comprised pages that Avaaz had identified as sharing at least three misinformation claims that were fact-checked between October 2019 and October 2020, with at least two of the posts falling within 90 days of each other. The report said that Facebook's delay in acting had been critical because it allowed prolific spreaders of misinformation to increase their online footprint dramatically, with some tripling their engagement over the course of the election campaign and even catching up with mainstream US media pages. It added that even after Facebook acted to block top-performing misinformation pages from October 10, the effect was inconsistent. While the average decline in interaction was 28 per cent, not all major figures were affected.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flags were flying at full staff for only a few hours between Monday—when they were at half staff due to last week’s Atlanta spa shootings—and when President Biden ordered them back to half staff to honor the victims of the Boulder, Colorado, supermarket shootings. Ten people were killed in Boulder; eight were killed in Atlanta.

Biden spoke Tuesday, calling on the Senate to “immediately pass the two House-passed bills that close holes in the background check system. These are bills that received votes of both Republicans and Democrats in the House. This is not and should not be a partisan issue. It’s an American issue. It will save lives, American lives, and we have to act. We should also ban assault weapons in the process."

The mass shooting in Boulder came two weeks after a judge blocked a local law banning AR-15-style weapons and magazines with a greater than a 10-shot capacity. And it came the evening before a previously scheduled Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence. At that hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz angrily said that “what happens in this committee after every mass shooting is Democrats propose taking away guns from law-abiding citizens, because that’s their political objective.”

Let’s start with the fact that this hearing wasn’t supposed to come the morning after a mass shooting. That just happened, spontaneously, because America. Can I get a U-S-A chant going in here?

Cruz was touting his own gun legislation with Sen. Chuck Grassley, which focuses on keeping people with mental illness from having guns, claiming that this, not Democratic proposals, would do the most to prevent gun violence. He was doing this literally the week after eight murders were allegedly committed by someone who had bought a handgun that very day, with no waiting period, legally. The suspect in the Atlanta shootings does not appear to have a history of mental illness, and, of course, the vast, vast majority of people with mental illness do not shoot people. Other countries have people with mental illness and do not have the gun violence of the United States. Cruz is hammering on a bill that would only stigmatize people, not do anything about gun violence.

Cruz is also focusing his ire on Democrats wanting to take guns away from law-abiding citizens at the same moment Republicans are objecting vociferously to the Violence Against Women Act because it would close the “boyfriend loophole,” taking guns away from stalkers and men who have committed violence against women they had relationships with.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn described the importance of guns for protecting businesses against racial justice protesters, specifically citing Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Kyle Rittenhouse became a hero of the far right by shooting and killing two protesters.

Sen. John Kennedy railed against strengthening gun laws because “We have a lot of drunk drivers in America ... We ought to try to combat that too. But I think what many people on my side of the aisle are saying too is the answer is not not to get rid of all sober drivers. The answer is to concentrate on the problem.”

As Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts responded, Kennedy “is a gun lobby lackey who knows we reduced car accident deaths through a whole host of solutions, including seatbelts, speed limits and enhanced car technology. Congress hasn’t even tried trying to do anything like that when it comes to reducing gun deaths.”

We have licensing requirements for cars. We have insurance requirements and seatbelt requirements and the cars themselves have been made safer and safer over the years. If you drive drunk, you are likely to face consequences in a way many people do not face for unsafe handling of guns. And you know what? Cars have a purpose beyond killing things. They do kill things, because they are large dangerous machines, but that’s not the central thing cars do. Killing is the central thing guns do. Other uses are the side project when it comes to guns.

Mass shootings fell out of the news in 2020 because they weren’t happening in schools and supermarkets, but the shootings went on. There were a record number of mass shootings in 2020, USA Today reports. They just happened in neighborhoods and to people that don’t draw media attention. There were also more than 41,000 gun deaths in 2020, more than 20,000 of them suicides.

So Ted Cruz can save his outrage about hearings that fall right after mass shootings. It’s like being outraged about a day that ends in Y falling right after a mass shooting. Marsha Blackburn needs to come out and say directly what she implicitly conveyed: that the argument for guns is to preserve white supremacy. John Kennedy can shut his mouth about cars, because Mr. Rhodes Scholar over there knows just how false that argument is. 

In the wake of the Atlanta and Boulder mass shootings, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer reaffirmed that the Senate will vote on background check bills already passed by the House, one of the bills having 84% public support. It’s going to be yet another piece of legislation blocked in the Senate by the filibuster and by minority rule, just as “54 senators who voted for background checks in 2013 represented 76 MILLION more Americans than 46 senators who killed bill,” as Ari Berman pointed out.

End the filibuster. Pass stronger gun laws.

In response to Dominion’s defamation lawsuit, Powell’s lawyers say “reasonable people” wouldn’t buy her claims.

As a former Trump campaign lawyer, Sidney Powell did more than perhaps anyone to push the big lie that President Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in last November’s presidential election was the result of fraud involving Dominion Voting Systems machines. Now, however, lawyers representing her have acknowledged that the “big lie” is, in fact, just that.

Powell faces a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion because of her false claims, and on Monday her lawyers offered her defense: that “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements” Powell made about election fraud “were truly statements of fact.”

“Indeed, Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as ‘wild accusations’ and ‘outlandish claims.’ They are repeatedly labelled ‘inherently improbable’ and even ‘impossible,’” Powell’s lawyers add. “Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants’ position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.”

Indeed, Powell’s conspiracy theories were wild and outlandish.

During an infamous November 19 news conference, for instance, she asserted that there was a “globalist” conspiracy to take down Trump — improbably involving the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez — and asserted that “in the middle of the night, after they’ve supposedly stopped counting, and that’s when the Dominion operators went in and injected votes and changed the whole system.”

There was just one problem for Powell: She was never able to produce a shred of evidence for her claims.

On the contrary, election officials on both sides of the aisle, and Trump administration officials like Attorney General Bill Barr, admitted that Biden’s victory over Trump was the product of a free and fair election. And the outlandishness of her conspiracy theories seemed to be a bit much even for Rudy Giuliani, who during a Newsmax interview in December distanced Trump’s legal team from Powell and said her arguments go beyond “the bounds of rationality, common sense, and the law.”

But as the legal challenges to the election that Powell and other lawyers filed on behalf of Trump failed one by one, Trump not only didn’t join Giuliani in distancing himself from Powell, but reportedly considered appointing her as special counsel to investigate the very unfounded claims of election fraud she was pushing.

That plan didn’t pan out, and in the days after the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, Dominion began taking legal action against those who pushed lies about its voting systems, including Powell, Giuliani, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, Fox News, and Newsmax.

“Dominion brings this action to set the record straight,” lawyers representing Dominion wrote in the suit against Powell, adding later: “There are mountains of direct evidence that conclusively disprove Powell’s vote manipulation claims against Dominion — namely, the millions of paper ballots that were audited and recounted by bipartisan officials and volunteers in Georgia and other swing states, which confirmed that Dominion accurately counted votes on paper ballots.”

Powell’s legal filing suggests her money was never where her mouth was.

And yet the big lie lives on

While Powell’s attorneys were quietly acknowledging that her conspiracy theories aren’t true, Trump was on Fox News pushing the big lie with impunity.

“Look, we won the election, as far as I’m concerned. We had a great election. We had almost 75 million votes,” he said on Tuesday.

Trump wasn’t challenged to back up his claims, but it is notable that there’s been a change in his approach when talking about the election, and one that was apparent in his Fox News appearance.

When the former president has tried to make a case that the election was stolen from him in recent weeks, he’s no longer made claims about votes being changed. Instead, he’s argued that pandemic-related changes to state election laws were unconstitutional — arguments that were rejected in courtroom after courtroom when Trump’s lawyers made them, including by judges he appointed.

Despite this shift, Trump ultimately hasn’t repudiated his false claims, as Powell appears to be doing. And as baseless as it may be, the big lie not only lives on in Trump’s new narrative but is giving Republicans in states like Georgia and Arizona that Trump narrowly lost a pretext to try to make it harder for people to vote.

Powell is reviving the Tucker Carlson defense

Powell’s court filing represents the second time in recent months that a prominent Trumpworld figure has acknowledged in a court of law that they are full of it. Fox News did much the same thing to defend host Tucker Carlson against a defamation lawsuit brought by Karen McDougal, a woman who claims to have had an affair with Trump.

As Aaron Blake explains for the Washington Post:

When Carlson accused Karen McDougal of extorting former president Donald Trump over her claims of an affair, McDougal filed suit against him. Fox News’s defense was that a “reasonable viewer” would not accept such claims as fact because of the tenor of Carlson’s show. And a judge agreed, dismissing the case.

It remains to be seen whether Powell’s strategy will be similarly successful. But her filing makes it clearer than ever that Trump allies’ attempt to overthrow the 2020 election was a naked power grab based on a pack of lies.

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Someone on patreon pointed out that Hitler tried to go into painting, and it's just ruined my whole point.

Today's News:

Supporters of statehood for Washington, D.C., brought facts and a case for fair treatment to a House Oversight Committee hearing on the subject Monday. Opponents … didn’t.

On the yes side: Washington, D.C., has more residents than either Wyoming or Vermont, but no voting representation in Congress. Its residents pay more federal taxes than residents of most states. The District’s lack of local control means that, for instance, on Jan. 6 as the U.S. Capitol was under attack, the Metropolitan Police Department came to the aid of the Capitol Police, but District officials could not activate the National Guard themselves, and the White House and Defense Department delayed for hours. 

On the no side: Washington, D.C., “would be the only state, the only state, without an airport, without a car dealership, without a capital city, without a landfill,” according to Rep. Jody Hice. The District does in fact have multiple car dealerships, and is closely surrounded by three major airports, one of which can be reached by subway.

”They have no source of income,” Rep. Ralph Norman said. “In South Carolina, we have farming. In South Carolina, we have mining. The new state of Washington will have none of that.”

(Am I the only one hearing this in Hamilton Cabinet battle format? Seriously, the man all but said “We plant seeds in the South.”)

Washington, D.C., has an NBA team, an NHL team, an MLB team. (The Washington football team does play outside the District.) Just 21 states and Washington, D.C., have an NBA team. Just 17 states and Washington, D.C., have an MLB team. The same goes for the NHL. South Carolina may have mining and farming, but it has none of those. Different areas have different resources and different economies. The District has a vibrant economy and institutions and 700,000 people live there. That’s what matters.

On the no side, if we’re being honest: Washington, D.C., votes for Democrats, and Republicans don’t like that. Also, its residents are plurality Black, and Republicans don’t like that, either. (The two are admittedly related at this point in time, and Republicans would rather keep Black people from voting than try to win their votes.) 

“You are constantly trying to create a political and ideological test for admission to the union,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a longtime advocate of statehood for D.C., said at the hearing. “The question is, are these taxpaying, draftable American citizens . . . deserving of equal rights? Of course they are.” But as Republicans are showing in state after state, they don’t think anyone is deserving of equal rights who is likely to use those rights to vote for a Democrat.

“How can you ask D.C. veterans to keep carrying the burden of disenfranchisement when we have shouldered the burden of defending our country?” a veteran who lives in the District asked. 

How? Well, rank, ruthless partisanship is always a good answer where Republicans are concerned. But this exchange gets to the heart of the other key issue at stake:

Statehood passed the House last year and is expected to pass again this year. The Senate will be a problem on this as on all things. The filibuster needs to go, or at least to be seriously reformed. Statehood for Washington, D.C., is yet another key issue for U.S. democracy itself.

A few months after losing the White House, Republicans across the country have had a revelation: The Electoral College could use some improvements. The problem is that they have contradictory proposals for how to fix it—and contradictory arguments for why those proposals would help Americans pick their president. In Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire, GOP lawmakers want to award Electoral College votes by congressional district, just like Nebraska and Maine currently do. But in Nebraska, Republicans want to do the opposite, and return to the same winner-takes-all method used by, well, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Hampshire, and almost every other state.

These Republicans do agree on one thing, however: They insist that their proposals have nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.

“I think people would just feel better knowing that their vote went to the candidate that they chose in their area,” Gary Tauchen, a GOP state legislator in Wisconsin, told me recently. Tauchen is 67 and retiring next year, and the measure he’s introduced, which would split Wisconsin’s electoral votes by congressional district, could be a capstone to a 16-year career in the legislature. Under his bill, even if deep-blue Milwaukee and Madison pushed the state into the Democratic column—as they have in eight of the past nine presidential elections—shutting out Republicans entirely would be virtually impossible. Tauchen said he would have introduced his bill even if Trump had won Wisconsin last year. Why, then, didn’t he push it after 2016, when Trump narrowly carried the state? “The timing wasn’t right, I don’t think,” he said. “This just seemed more appropriate for right now.”

In New Hampshire, Bill Gannon, a Republican state senator, has proposed similar legislation. He told me he got the idea from his son, a college student who had read about how Maine divvies up its electoral votes. Republicans control New Hampshire’s governorship and legislature, and if they pass Gannon’s bill, the GOP could wind up with an extra electoral vote in 2024 even if Democrats carry the state again. Around the time Gannon offered up his proposal, a prominent Michigan Republican suggested that his state do the same.

Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a 24-year-old Yale graduate named Julie Slama wants her state to go in the other direction. A state senator first appointed by Governor Pete Ricketts in 2018, Slama has introduced a bill that would award all of Nebraska’s electors to the winner of the statewide vote. The last Democrat to carry the reliably red state was Lyndon B. Johnson. Trump won the statewide vote last year by nearly 20 points. But Joe Biden, like Barack Obama before him, walked away with one of Nebraska’s five electors by winning a district that comprises Omaha and its suburbs. Had Biden won about 44,000 fewer total votes across Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, that single electoral vote in Nebraska would have decided the election.

Yet when I raised this with Slama, she never mentioned the advantage her party would gain. Instead, she drew her argument from the Constitution. “The Founders and the Framers made it very clear that states, not segments of states, were intended to determine the president,” Slama told me, “and we really shouldn’t have presidential elections determined by lines drawn by politicians.”

[Read: The secret to beating the Electoral College]

Taken together, the changes these legislators are seeking would likely ensure that the next Republican presidential nominee wins at least a few more electoral votes in the race to 270. But the proposals could also backfire. All of the states trying to imitate Nebraska are battlegrounds; Trump won Wisconsin and Michigan in 2016, and he came within 3,000 votes of carrying New Hampshire that year. All of them could be competitive in 2024. “At the end of the day, I think that they might live to regret those things,” warns Ryan Hamilton, the executive director of the Nebraska Republican Party.

The desired result of the proposals, however, is clear: These bills are aimed at making it harder for Democrats to win. At this point, they are all long shots; none of the proposals currently has the votes to pass. But Democrats are taking them seriously, seeing the attempts to tweak the Electoral College system as linked to the GOP’s much more widely publicized efforts to suppress voter turnout.

If Republicans are trying to tinker with the Electoral College to boost their chances, many Democrats want to go much further to strengthen theirs. Some have long wanted to abolish the institution altogether. Others are pushing legislation that would effectively neutralize the Electoral College by creating a multistate compact to elect as president the winner of the national popular vote, an idea that arose in response to the disputed 2000 election of George W. Bush. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia—all controlled by Democrats—have endorsed the measure over the years, but few supporters believe that it will win over enough states to succeed anytime soon.

Unlike in Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire, the push to change Nebraska’s system isn’t new—Republicans have been trying to abolish the state’s Electoral College split almost from the moment it was enacted. Nebraska has the nation’s only unicameral, nonpartisan legislature, which requires legislation to muster a supermajority to pass. A Democratic state senator succeeded in winning bipartisan support to implement the Electoral College change in 1991, and Nebraska’s Democratic governor at the time signed it into law. Hamilton, the state GOP executive director, concedes that his party’s desire to return to the winner-takes-all system plays to its advantage, but he has a tough time accounting for the fact that Republicans in other states are moving in the opposite direction. When I asked him about this contradiction, he paused for a few seconds. “I’m trying to answer judiciously,” he told me. “I respect what they’re trying to do.”

Nebraska Republicans likely would have succeeded already if it were not for Ernie Chambers. A 46-year veteran of the legislature from Omaha, Chambers mounted a days-long filibuster in 2016 to preserve the current system. Republicans at one point had the votes they needed to adopt the winner-takes-all method, but a couple of members peeled off after Chambers commandeered the floor and jeopardized the passage of other bills before the legislative session expired. Chambers, who is Black and has long described himself as a “defender of the downtrodden,” argues that the change would silence the voices of nonwhite citizens in Omaha, Nebraska’s biggest city. “There is very little impact that the people who are not white and Republican in Nebraska can have,” he told me. “But that doesn’t mean people will not do with the  little they have to work with.”

Chambers, 83, is now out of office, having been forced to leave last year for the second time in his career because of term limits. When I spoke with him recently, he said he didn’t know if the defenders of Nebraska’s unusual approach would prevail again. But he was unsentimental. “Politics is a dirty, backstabbing, double-crossing racket,” Chambers said. “If you’ve got the numbers, you want winner-take-all. If you don’t have the numbers, you want to at least have a little bit of an opportunity for your voice to be heard.”

“There’s nothing mystical about it, nothing philosophical about it,” Chambers said about the fight over the Electoral College, both in Nebraska and elsewhere. “It’s politics, pure and simple.”

Ten people were shot and killed in the parking lot and aisles of a Boulder, Colorado, supermarket on Monday afternoon. Among those killed was a police officer who entered the store in response to reports of shots fired. Witnesses reported hearing up to thirty shots. Police report that a “person of interest” is in custody, suspected to be a shirtless man seen being led from the store in handcuffs. While police have not yet identified the suspect or detailed the weapon involved, the number of rapid fire shots suggests a semiautomatic weapon, and CNN cites a law-enforcement official as saying that the weapon was an AR-15 style rifle.

The shooting comes less than two weeks after Colorado blocked the city of Boulder from enforcing a local ordinance banning AR-15 style weapons and magazines with a greater than 10 shot capacity, as reported by the Denver Post. Just six days before the shooting, the NRA celebrated the ruling in a tweet calling it “an NRA victory in Colorado.” 

On Monday afternoon, the as-yet unnamed suspect used an AR-15 rifle for exactly the purpose for which these guns are designed: killing a large number of humans in a short period of time.

Though 2020 brought a pandemic and economic disaster, the isolation carried with it a decline in mass shootings. Six mass shootings were reported for the year, with two of those occurring before the pandemic began. This followed 18 such shootings in 2019, and 19 mass shootings in 2018. But the new year has already brought seven mass shootings, with events in Boulder coming just a week after a series of shootings in the Atlanta area that left eight people dead, including six Asian American women. 

The officer killed in the Boulder shooting was identified as Eric Talley, aged 51. Talley was the father of seven children. The other murder victims have not yet been named.

Some of those who escaped the shooting in Boulder by running out the back of the store and exiting through loading ramps report that the shooter didn’t say anything. He began shooting people in the parking lot outside, entered the store, and kept on shooting. Reuters has drone footage showing a bearded white man—apparently both shirtless and shoeless—being led away by police. Blood can be seen on his leg, and it is assumed that he is the suspect in the shooting.

The NRA posts reporting the overturn of Boulder’s ban on such assault weapons last week was particularly festive, trumpeting their support of the effort to block the ordinance and warning other cities that they would be back to fight any localities “who are considering passing any similar counterproductive ordinances.” Counterproductive, in NRA terms, meant that it was an impediment to obtaining a machine whose singular purpose is killing people in quantity.

The ruling was based on a provision of Colorado law passed in 2003—a year in which Republicans controlled the Colorado house, senate, and governorship. Regulation states that a local government can’t enact a ban on any type of weapon that can be purchased under federal law. The law remains in place, even though Democrats have controlled all three parts of the Colorado government since 2019. 

In 2000, around 85,000 AR-15 style rifles were sold. In 2005, after the assault weapons ban ended, the number jumped to 125,000. By 2008, sales exceeded 300,000. In 2012, sales exceeded 1 million for the first time. They’ve never fallen below that line since. The AR-15 now accounts for about a third of all rifles sold. And while 2020 may have dented most items in the economy, it was a record year for firearms sales.

When news sources or right-wing politicians call the AR-15 “America’s most popular rifle,” it’s worth remembering that this is a very recent phenomenon. Two decades ago, these were rare rifles owned by a small percentage of Americans who owned guns. A short time ago, the majority of rifles fell into two categories—.22 rimfire rifles used primarily for target shooting and small game; larger caliber centerfire rifles, many of them bolt or lever action, used in hunting deer and large game. Something like the AR-15 was an exotic item, even for people who owned guns.

In those two decades, deer did not become enormously smarter. Rabbits did not become bulletproof. Groundhogs did not learn to dodge. People did not buy these rifles to hunt any of the above.

The truth is that the most popular rifle sold in America today is not designed for hunting or for pecking at paper targets. It is designed for exactly what it did in Boulder on Monday afternoon—leaving bodies strewn in its wake. There is no defense against such a weapon. Not only was one of those who died a police officer who entered the store knowing that a shooting was in progress, it’s a fair bet that others in the store were armed. Concealed carry is legal everywhere in Colorado. None of that would matter, because this type of rifle is designed to allow the murder of multiple people before there can be any possible response. Millions of Americans have purchased rifles that are only really good at killing millions of other Americans.

(715): Our son just found our secret Sex Dungeon that is no longer hidden in our basement. He brought his Xbox and the TV down there he is currently sitting in the sex swing playing video games. What do I do?

According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, hospitals are blocking confidential prices from web searches with special coding embedded on their websites. It's problematic because pricing information for hospital services must be disclosed under a new federal price transparency rule that went into effect on Jan. 1. Becker's Hospital Review reports: The code prevents pages from appearing in searches, such as a hospital's name and prices, computer experts told the Journal. While the prices are still there, it requires clicking through multiple layers of pages to find them. "It's technically there, but good luck finding it," Chirag Shah, an associate computer professor at the University of Washington, told the Journal. "It's one thing not to optimize your site for searchability, it's another thing to tag it so it can't be searched. It's a clear indication of intentionality." Hospitals burying their pricing data include those owned by HCA Healthcare and Universal Health Services as well as the University of Pennsylvania Health System, NYU Langone Health, Beaumont Health and Novant Health, according to the Journal. Penn Medicine, NYU Langone Health and Novant Health told the publication they used the blocking code to direct patients first to information they "considered more useful than raw pricing data," for which they included web links. UHS uses the blocking code to ensure consumers acknowledge a disclosure statement before viewing prices and is making no effort to hide information, a hospital spokesperson told the Journal. After the Journal reached out to hospitals about its discovery, the search-blocking code was removed from sites including those of HCA, Penn Medicine, Beaumont, Avera Health, Ballad Health and Northern Light Health. An HCA spokesperson told the publication the search blocker was "a legacy code that we removed," and Avera, Ballad, Beaumont and Northern Light said the code had been left on their websites by mistake.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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You couldn’t find a better example of just how little Republican House members think of their constituents than this. CNN conducted a survey of all members of the House of Representatives to determine how many had received at least the first dose of one of the three available vaccines for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has killed approximately 540,000 Americans.

CNN confirmed that 189 Democrats out of 219 in the House have been vaccinated. One Democrat confirmed he had not been vaccinated but planned to be and there were 29 Democrats for whom CNN did not receive responses.

CNN also confirmed that 53 House Republicans out of 211 have been vaccinated. Thirteen Republicans told CNN they have not been vaccinated even as many said they planned to be. CNN did not receive a response from 145 House Republicans.

(emphasis added)

For the record, I think we can assume that the true number of vaccinations between Republicans and Democratic representatives is actually quite similar, since the number of those (including senators and House representatives) publicly reported to have been infected skews heavily (nearly triple the number) toward Republicans, almost wholly due to their insistence on refusing to social distance or use masks. If for some reason that is not the case, it would suggest that most Republicans as a group are either a.) completely honest, delusional, or cognitively impaired, b.) mindlessly obstinate, or c.) afraid to reveal their status because of what their constituents would think.

If they were completely honest, delusional, or cognitively impaired, they would be likely to tell the truth about their status (either yes or no, or “planning” to be vaccinated), rather than refuse to answer, because either they would want their constituents to be vaccinated, not vaccinated, or it would make no difference to them. So they’re not “completely honest,” delusional, or cognitively impaired.

If they were just mindlessly obstinate, dyed-in-the-wool deniers and truly believed the COVID-19 pandemic was nothing but a “hoax,” they would likely respond that they had not been vaccinated, since they would not want to encourage their constituents to be vaccinated. This might be a reprehensible response, but at least it would be truthful. But those 145 chose instead not to say whether they’d been vaccinated—or not.

Finally, if they were simply afraid to reveal their status, they would refuse to respond, which is what 145 of them have done.

So we can fairly assume that most if not all of these 145 Republicans are afraid to reveal their vaccinated or non-vaccinated status. But by succumbing to this fear and refusing to reveal their status, they’re implicitly and deliberately placing their own political interests above the lives of their constituents. Because otherwise they would fall into category a.) above.

This is the uniform excuse being employed by those Republicans who refuse to respond:

"Isn't that a HIPAA violation?" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said when asked about her vaccine status.

"I don't know if should tell you," Rep. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said. "I am not going to answer that."

"That's not appropriate," Rep. Jason Smith, a Republican from Missouri, chimed in as he overheard the question.

Later when Smith was asked about his vaccination status, he shot back, "The fact that you are asking them their health information, I think that is really unacceptable."

Of course HIPAA has nothing to do with this. As the CNN article points out, it’s neither a violation of HIPAA nor an infringement on their “privacy” to disclose whether you’ve been vaccinated or not: “HIPAA applies to health care providers, who are barred from sharing personal health information about their patients without consent, not to individuals who willingly share their information.”

These Republicans know this full well. As public figures allegedly hired to represent their constituents, in the face of a massive and deadly public health crisis they have a civic duty, if not an obligation, out of basic human decency to respond “yes” or “no.”

But clearly that is too much to ask of them.

A white Washington sheriff is accused of racially profiling a newspaper carrier then lying that the worker threatened to kill him. Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer retracted his statement after initially telling a 911 dispatcher repeatedly that a man later identified as 24-year-old carrier Sedrick Altheimer threatened to kill him after the two crossed paths early on Jan. 27, according to The Seattle Times. The 911 call, treated as "the highest priority," led to response from 42 units from the sheriff's office, state troopers, and Tacoma police, the newspaper reported. “I didn’t expect that big of a response,” Troyer said in an interview. But the sheriff had initiated an "officer needs Help" call, which is only surpassed in importance by Mount Rainier erupting and triggering a cataclysmic mudslide, the dispatcher told police.

Altheimer said he was afraid to move his hands out of police sight and that one officer had a gun drawn. “I’m yelling ‘what are you guys here for? What am I doing wrong? You guys are trying to arrest a paper carrier!’” Altheimer said. “These police officers just wasted a gallon of gas speeding over here — for what? I’m giving the people the news and I’m going home. I’ve got five kids.” Pierce County councilmembers, however, seemed more concerned about the potential legal threat Altheimer posed than his actual well-being.

Amy Cruver, a member of the Pierce County Council, made a case during a council study session on Monday for the council not to comment on the incident. "I'm just concerned if someone comments and someone misconstrues it if that could come back on the council as a lawsuit when, you know, he is an elected position," she said at the meeting held via Zoom. "Is it improper to take a stance of let due process play out?"

Washington State Assistant Attorney General Ian Northrip, who represents the county and attended the virtual meeting, responded: “It’s not improper, but there are lots of other things that also aren’t improper.” Council Chairman Derek Young told Cruver, "we aren't obligated to weigh in." Northrip focused mostly on answering the council’s questions related to potential legal ramifications of the incident involving the sheriff. He said claims against the council are possible and that any factual questions the council has about the case or legal strategy should be reserved for executive session, which isn’t public. When asked whether the council should bring in an outside investigator, Northrip said the county would have “significant powers” to investigate as long as it was considering legislation, but councilmembers would be limited to the prosecutor’s office in terms of bringing in an outside investigator. The council went into executive session before getting into any details of the encounter. When Young returned from the closed session he said on behalf of the council that it was still gathering facts in the incident “and we’ll have more as soon as we’re able to review that information.”

Altheimer told The Seattle Times he never threatened the sheriff. “I was just asking questions, like ‘Are you a cop?’” he said. The Black father told the newspaper he was driving a 1995 Geo Prizm on his normal paper route when he passed an unmarked Chevy Tahoe and saw the Tahoe turn around to trail him. “I continue what I’m doing, because, you know, I’m working,” he said. “I’m not doing any harm to the neighborhood. I work here every night.”

But the SUV kept following him, so Altheimer hand-delivered one newspaper in a cylinder and went to confront the person driving the SUV, The Seattle Times reported. “So I asked him, ‘Who are you?’” Altheimer said. The sheriff failed to identify himself but started questioning Altheimer and accusing him of stealing mail from front porches, the newspaper carrier said. Altheimer told The Seattle Times he called Troyer a racist, which the sheriff denied, citing a Black wife as proof. Troyer later said in an interview he didn’t know Altheimer was Black until he got out of his car and that he initially started following the driver because he was behaving suspiciously. “I never talked to him. I never talked to the guy,” Troyer said.

Altheimer invited Troyer to call police if he felt threatened. “So then he makes a comment, he’s like ‘Oh, I got four cars on the way,’” Altheimer said. The sheriff told a 911 dispatcher he thought Altheimer looked homeless. “Hey, it’s Troyer,” the sheriff began the 911 call The Seattle Times obtained audio of. “I’m at 27th and Deidra in Tacoma, in North End, about two blocks from my house, and I caught someone in my driveway who just threatened to kill me and I’ve blocked him in. He’s here right now.”

Troyer could be heard in the audio telling a dispatcher Altheimer was parked in the sheriff’s driveway and his neighbor’s driveway, and at another point in the call, Troyer said he had Altheimer blocked in. Then, he changed his story to Altheimer had the sheriff blocked in. “I’m trying to be polite to him, and he just says I’m a racist and wants to kill me,” Troyer said. “So I don’t want anything other than him to let me, just let me go home, which is two blocks away, which I just came out of my house.”

The Tacoma Action Collective, a community group working to fight systemic oppression, is calling for the sheriff to resign to save taxpayers the trouble of orchestrating an election recall. Troyer, a former public information officer, was elected sheriff last November. “Ed Troyer shouldn't have been elected sheriff,” the community group said on Twitter. “He LIED about what happened to Manuel Ellis on national tv. We even put his audio clip over a video of what actually happened. And now this. Now do y'all believe us?” 

The sheriff defended officers after Manuel Ellis, a Black man, died in police custody of a lack of oxygen due to the position officers held him in, restraints they forced on him, and a spit hood they deployed on March 3, 2020. His death was ruled a homicide, but Troyer was sure to highlight the fact that Ellis had methamphetamine in his system as well as a heart condition in an interview with KIRO 7. “We understand that this death has similarities to what’s going on across the country. And even though the cause of death might’ve been slightly related, the manner in which we got there is a totally different story,” Troyer said. “This is not that type of incident. This is an incident where he contacted a police car. They were not trying to arrest him. He was having some type of issue and assaulted a police officer. 

“They were able to get him into custody. That’s when he had trouble breathing.”

WARNING: This video contains profanity and graphic content that may be triggering for viewers.

The Tacoma Action Collection called Troyer a liar. “He's not only a liar, he's a racist. And a threat to Black people in Pierce County,” the community group tweeted.

"A new study from Microsoft, released Monday, found that among the more than 31,000 workers it surveyed, 73% hoped remote work options would continue when the pandemic ends," reports CNET. "Even Gen Z applicants were slightly more likely to apply for a job with remote options than for one strictly in an office," even though they feel that they're losing out on the career growth that happens in the office. CNET reports: Gen Z workers, born roughly between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s, responded to Microsoft's surveys generally by saying they're more stressed and find they're struggling more than their peers. They tend to be single, since they're younger, leading them to feel isolated. And since they're early in their careers, they don't have financial means to create a good workspace at home if their employer won't pay for it. And they're not having those in-person meetings that sometimes help them land in career advancing projects, or even to get in good with the boss. "Without hallway conversations, chance encounters, and small talk over coffee, it's hard to feel connected even to my immediate team, much less build meaningful connections across the company," wrote Hannah McConnaughey, a product marketing manager at Microsoft who's a Gen Z worker. "Networking as someone early in their career has gotten so much more daunting since the move to fully remote work -- especially since switching to a totally different team during the pandemic!" Employees also say they want flexibility rather than fully remote jobs. Of the workers Microsoft surveyed, 73% said they want remote work options to stay, with 46% saying they plan to move now that they can work remotely. Still, 67% said they want more in-person work or collaboration too. In short: We don't seem to know what we want yet. [...] In its conclusions, Microsoft suggests companies invest in technology that helps bridge the physical and digital worlds, so teams can work remotely and in the office. Additionally, it says Gen Z employees need more career support.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The time of accountability is now. For too long, many law enforcement officials have gotten away with hateful rhetoric, violence, and police brutality, but not anymore. Advocates and community members are demanding that law enforcement be held accountable for their actions whether physical or verbal. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a private Facebook group, called the Pittsburgh Area Police Breakroom, was found to have numerous posts that not only depicted transphobia but bullied those supporting anti-police brutality.

According to the Associated Press, the Facebook group described as a place for officers to “decompress, rant, share ideas,” is made up of both current and retired officers. While a majority of the group's posts were reportedly about the hardships of being an officer, some depicted hate amongst transphobic and xenophobic rhetoric. The change comes as a few dozen members have become more vocal with their pro-Donald Trump ideology and criticism of “demoncrats” and coronavirus safety measures.

Years’ worth of posts were found not only criticizing chiefs who took a knee or officers who marched with Black Lives Matter protesters but those that called protesters “terrorists” or “thugs.” Additionally, members who supported anti-police brutality protesters, COVID-19 safety regulations, or Joe Biden were bullied in the group, the AP reported. Among those who were bullied and left the group as a result, one officer said the Fraternal Order of Police’s Trump endorsement did not represent her and a Black officer. Both the officers were allegedly accused of creating a fake Facebook account to complain about the lack of diversity in local departments.

“If you are a law enforcement officer and you kneel or lie on the ground so easily over the false narrative of police brutality, you will one day be executed on your knees or your stomach without a fight by the same criminals that you are currently pandering to,” Joe Hoffman, a West Mifflin Borough Police officer wrote criticizing Webster, Massachusetts, Police Chief Michael Shaw. Hoffman also referred to the Black Lives Matter organization as “Black Lies Matter.”

But the hate in the group doesn’t just target other officers and Black Lives Matter protestors. In one incident Tim Huschak, a corporal at the Borough of Lincoln Police Department, posted a screenshot of an Allegheny County 911 dispatcher’s Facebook page, in which the dispatcher noted that the phrase “Blue Lives Matter” is not equivalent to the slogan “Black Lives Matter” because policing is a choice, while race is not. Alongside the screenshot, he said: “Many negative posts on police. And we should trust her with our lives???”

Following the post, angry members came together and demanded the dispatcher be fired. “Multiple officers should call and report it. Remember NO JUSTICE NO PEACE LOL,” West Mifflin Borough Police Department officer Tommy Trieu responded under his Facebook name, Tommy Bear, according to the AP.

Trieu was one of the two West Mifflin officers seen on video last year restraining a teenage Black girl after responding to a call about a fight on a school bus. While calls to fire him and the other officer were widespread, borough officials claimed that the recording occurred after a student hit an officer and thus the officers “did nothing wrong.”

Speaking to the AP in regards to his comment, Trieu defended it and claimed he was only advising other officers that they could file a grievance with the dispatcher’s supervisor if they feared for their safety.

According to the AP, the group’s posts and comments were visible up until last week. Since then posts have been deleted or suspended from view. At the time that the news outlet was able to view posts and comments, the group had about 2,200 members including at least one judge and councilman amongst the officers.

Officers contacted by the AP did not all defend their comments but noted that they believed in “law and order,” a phrase Trump consistently used to spread his hate and bias toward minority communities—while even depicting his support for the Proud Boys.

Officers not only encouraged the use of lethal force but shared posts making fun of lawmakers due to their identity. In one incident, a transphobic post was made about former Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine for her efforts in stopping the spread of COVID-19. Levine, who is transgender, was referred to as “he,” “it,” and “freak,” amongst other names. In one post a retired officer even said: “Someone needs to shoot this thing!!” 

While the group emphasizes that “what goes in here, STAYS IN HERE,” it apparently has no rules on what can be said and does not prohibit offensive, racist, sexist, or other threatening content.

This isn’t the first time concerns about bias on officers’ social media accounts have been brought up. Various incidents have been reported in which officers have not only shared hateful rhetoric following protests to end police brutality but those in connection with pro-Trump protests and violence leading to the Capitol insurrection in January. Many of these posts and comments potentially violate department social media policies that do not allow the expression of bias or harassment toward others.

A 2019 project, the Plain View Project, founded by a group of Philadelphia attorneys, examined Facebook accounts of at least 2,900 active and 600 retired officers and found that thousands of posts were not only racist and sexist but advocated for police brutality. The group of attorneys then made the database public, noting that these posts eroded the public’s trust. While Pittsburgh was not part of the project, city officials have received numerous complaints of posts by officers on social media.

“In our view, people who are subject to decisions made by law enforcement may fairly question whether these online statements about race, religion, ethnicity and the acceptability of violent policing -- among other topics -- inform officers’ on-the-job behaviors and choices,” the project’s founders wrote, the AP reported.

Following calls for officers to resign Pittsburgh Bureau of Police released a new policy stating that officers may face disciplinary action for sharing “any content involving discourteous or disrespectful remarks … pertaining to issues of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, and/or disability.”

But revising a department's social media policy is not enough. Officers must be accountable for the actions they take including what they post. In fields that are meant to protect citizens, bias and hate cannot be tolerated. Officers should not and cannot advocate for violence.

“You know, that doesn’t make it less upsetting,” Kyna James, a community organizer at the Alliance for Police Accountability in Pittsburgh said. “It’s 2021, and it’s a shame that we are still here and we are still dealing with this.”

Rep. Dan Crenshaw is best known for trying to put a more reasonable face on Republican corruption. Not unlike the rest of his party, Crenshaw is low on ideas and the ones he does have are bad ones reheated inside of a broken toaster oven. Last week, Crenshaw took to his Twitter account to attack the Biden administration for the rise in immigration on the southern border. Responding to a New York Times report that the Biden administration was trying to negotiate with Mexico to slow down the rise in immigration at the border, Crenshaw wrote, “It’s as if we had a solution to this already and then some guy came in and totally screwed it all up.” What exactly had Crenshaw and the Republican Party’s solution been?

Political news host Mehdi Hasan responded by saying, “Your solution was tearing very young children from their parents’ arms and detaining them indefinitely in horrific conditions—something described as ‘torture’ by Physicians for Human Rights.” Pointing out that, like the rest of the Republican Party, Crenshaw’s entire schtick is based in xenophobic told-you-so-isms did not go over well with the representative from Texas. The two men got into a back and forth on social media, with Hasan asking Crenshaw to appear on his MSNBC show to debate the subject of immigration policy. Surprisingly, Crenshaw agreed. Good for him. Also: not great for him, as his appearance very quickly became a reminder of why Republicans do not appear on shows where serious questions are asked and factual answers are required.

Here’s a little part of the exchange that led to Crenshaw’s appearance on Hasan’s show.

Hasan opened the interview by making sure to ask Crenshaw whether or not he accepted the results of the 2020 election, and the Biden administration’s legitimacy. It’s a fair question, considering how many members of Crenshaw’s Grand Old Party seem unable to find the courage to make such a simple assertion. Crenshaw did agree that Joe Biden was the duly elected president. He’s got that going for him! Then Hasan opened the debate by first pointing out that the data shows the Biden administration “inherited” rising numbers of immigrants seeking refuge in our country from the Trump administration. This, of course, is not the narrative being pushed by the GOP, which wants its base to believe that Donald Trump fixed immigration by being inhumane and now that Biden is in office, everyone is coming to our southern border and being allowed to steal all of your jobs, traffic all of your children, and start gangs.

Crenshaw began the way people without facts begin. “Yeah, I’m not sure where you are getting your data from,” he responded, going into the anecdotal information he has heard from “migrants” saying “Joe BIden invited them.” Crenshaw then stipulated that Biden’s reversal of Trump-era policies, including “really importantly [sic], the asylum cooperative agreements with northern triangle countries” is the real problem. This forced Hasan to feel the necessity to unpack a series of falsehoods that Crenshaw opened with. The first is to explain that the data Mehdi Hasan showed Crenshaw was compiled by the American Immigration Council using Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. This data shows that the increases in immigration-related apprehensions at our southern border have been going on for nine months. For those of you doing the heavy-duty math at home, Joe Biden took office about two months ago.

Crenshaw, a one-trick pony, responds by attempting to say Hasan is denying the recent surge in numbers since Biden’s election—something that Hasan is not denying. Crenshaw’s move here allows him to later pull a clip of him saying that, with zero context, which will then be used by Crenshaw and other right-wing echo chambers to say the interviewer was biased and untruthful. 

Then Hasan showed Dan Crenshaw video of … Dan Crenshaw … from a whole week before, saying that Joe Biden was not deporting people and was winking at potential asylum-seekers and immigrants, secretly telling them to create a Republican-inspired fever dream caravan. Hasan points out that more than 70% of “persons attempting entry along the Southwest border” of our country have indeed been deported away from the U.S. Crenshaw says he didn’t say that. The thing he just watched himself say, on screen, he said … he didn’t say. This was from a week ago. He has the same goddamn haircut.

Then Crenshaw tried to pivot to saying that individual adults aren’t the problem, as they usually get deported (something he claimed in the clip wasn’t happening of course). Instead, he says, it is the children and their families that are the problem. Crenshaw then tries to tout the northern triangle cooperative agreement between Trump, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras but Hassan cuts him off, making sure Crenshaw knows that we will get to addressing that idiotic policy. But first, let’s make Crenshaw squirm by asking him to admit that the lies and rhetoric he and people like Republican Voldermort Kevin McCarthy of California are telling the public are indeed factually incorrect.

Crenshaw tries to explain how facts aren’t facts because there are secret influxes of thousands of immigrants sneaking through the cracks that don’t show up on the fact sheets. They’re the best kind of “facts” the Republican Party has these days: unverifiable statements of fact. In fact, even though ICE and the CBP have had their budget more than double in the last 12 years to almost $5 billion, ICE is forced to feed and care for and drive around all of these immigrant families instead of patrolling our borders. I guess they aren’t able to do their jobs as inhumanely as people like Crenshaw and others would like.

Hasan then moves onto a more delicate problem for the Republican Party: unaccompanied minors. Trump’s administration has used the Title 42 CDC Order, a public health initiative, to deny thousands of asylum \-seekers refuge under the guise of COVID-19 prevention. While this inhumane act has been denounced by virtually everyone to the left of Donald Trump, Joe Biden has disappointingly yet to end it. Courts will continue to find the law illegal as it is an almost impossible hurdle to overcome for asylum-seekers and flies in the face of most lawyers’ (including Vice President Kamala Harris) understanding of our Constitution and the powers of the Executive Branch.

From there, Crenshaw explained that Trump expelled unaccompanied minors in the most humane way possible. They were all “meticulously” put on charter flights and handed over to their families, according to Crenshaw. The lie here is the conceit that parents are sending their children to the border out of desperation—or in the conservative mind, out of some Machiavellian ploy to live off of American welfare—but are also just waiting at an airport in Honduras or El Salvador or Guatemala for their children’s return if things don’t work out. It’s a truly twisted logic that both claims that these families are so reckless that they are willing to give their children over to “drug cartels” and “smugglers” and human traffickers, but also so loving as to be ready for their child to be chartered back to them safely by ICE.

Crenshaw went back to an old debunked claim he made in 2019 that upwards of 90% of asylum claims were not “valid asylum” claims. Hasan pointed out that Crenshaw’s claim was bullshit, but Crenshaw has tried to argue the validity of his statement based on former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ similar claims from 2018. The nature of Sessions’ claims are only true if you agree on Jeff Sessions’ criteria for asylum seeking which seem to only be: you are white and you are literally on fire when you show up at an border station.

But Crenshaw’s prattle about this is all in service of the magical solution for asylum seekers that he says the Trump administration worked out with their triangle cooperation policy whereas asylum-seekers are taken back to the country they are seeking asylum from, and then allowed to apply for asylum from those countries. Try not to think too hard about that Catch-22; you might find yourself voting for Marjorie Taylor-Greene if you work that logic out. Hasan asks Crenshaw how many of these legal-by-Crenshaw’s-estimation asylum seekers, using this magical solution Crenshaw is promoting as policy, have been granted asylum?

Crenshaw hems and haws a bit, saying he doesn’t have the statistics on him. Hasan makes sure he understands that the answer to how many asylum-seekers sent back to their country of origin to apply for asylum by way of this mythical agreement between the U.S. and their host country is … “zero.” As in none. Not a single one.

What Hasan is referring to is the simple fact that of the 945 asylum seekers the Trump administration sent to Guatemala with the public promise that they would be able to “legally” apply for asylum in the U.S., only 34 were even able to begin the application process. According to a Washington Post report, of those 34, “16 abandoned their cases,” while the remaining applications have not received a decision from the U.S. regarding their chances for asylum. That makes the number of asylum-seekers who have successfully received what conservatives consider a “legal” asylum in the United States, zero. This agreement, signed off on by Trump and his army of bigots, has also been applied to Honduras and El Salvador—though those two countries have yet to begin the plan due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Which means that those two countries have also been able to get asylum for zero people.

There has been a surge in migrant “apprehensions” at the U.S.-Mexico border since Joe Biden took office. This is what the Republican Party has latched on to as their only talking point that mimics a policy. Of course, it is important to note that the largest surge at the border took place over May of 2019, well into Donald Trump’s inhumane and worthless immigration policy. You might not have realized this since it didn’t get the conservative media coverage that the fake “caravan” got the previous year—even though there were significantly higher numbers of immigrants being documented at our country’s southern border.

The Donald Trump administration did very little to end undocumented immigration into our country. What Republicans did do, something that Crenshaw willfully ignored during the interview, was curb the only legal immigration into our country. It’s the perfect example of a political ploy by a xenophobic set of interests.

Crenshaw may have the respected military distinction of being a former Navy SEAL, but his recent political history is anything but respectable. This is a man who the Republican Party has worked very hard to manufacture the illusion of populism around. The GOP has thrown lots of money behind a public relations campaign to obfuscate the truth that Crenshaw only has an elected position because of the tortured gerrymandering done to his district. Like his Republican cohorts, Crenshaw has acted cowardly when presented with the facts of his involvement in shady character attacks on other former veterans.

Like most of the new breed of Republican politician, every time he appears in public (not on a propaganda channel like Fox News or OANN) he comes across at best as ill-informed, and at worst, like the rest of the corrupt leadership he’s trying to put a modern face on.

Enjoy the whole interview below.

The average tax rate on U.S. corporations fell by more than half, to 7.8 percent, in the wake of Republicans’ 2017 tax overhaul, according to a new government analysis.

In a report sure to inflame the debate over corporate taxation, the official Joint Committee on Taxation also said businesses continue to make extensive use of offshore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and Bermuda to reduce their tax bills.

At the same time, the nonpartisan office said, a tax created by Republicans to target that money stowed in low-tax jurisdictions, known as “GILTI,” is succeeding at dunning at least some of that money.

Companies paid an average total tax rate of 16 percent on that GILTI income, with 5.5 percent going to the IRS and the remainder paid to foreign governments.

The study also found that business investments in things like plants and equipment, as well as employment in the U.S., increased following enactment of the law.

The report comes as Democrats, searching for budget savings to finance their big-ticket spending initiatives, are eyeing multinational corporations. Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is preparing to release a new framework on international taxes that is expected to call for making provisions like GILTI much more stringent. His committee is planning a hearing Thursday on international tax rules.

Democrats, who’ve long argued corporations are not paying nearly enough, are likely to seize on the reported tax rates as much too low. Republicans, meanwhile, will likely be cheered by the increases JCT found in U.S. investment and employment.

The report is a rare look inside the tax lives of multinational corporations in the aftermath of the 2017 tax law. Unlike outside researchers, JCT has access to companies’ private tax returns, giving them an unusually clear view into what they are doing.

The agency was only able to look at tax year 2018, though, because there is a yearslong lag in what companies report paying. Because the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law in December 2017, it is unlikely many companies were able to make substantial moves in response to the law by 2018.

Still, the analysis provides some insight into the early effects of the legislation, which slashed the corporate rate, gave companies big deductions for investments and rewrote much of the U.S. tax system dealing with companies operating across borders.

The average tax rate actually paid by companies fell 51 percent — to 7.8 percent, from 16 percent the previous year, the report says.

The rate was higher when deferred taxes that will be paid in the future are taken into account — which is an estimate of what companies believe their long-run tax rate will be. By that measure, the average rate fell to 13.1 percent from 19.7 percent in 2017.

Rates were higher in transactions with major trading partners. Companies paid an average rate of 8.7 percent on earnings in Europe, and 18.1 percent on income from the U.S.’s top 10 trading partners.

The report shows companies make widespread use of offshore tax havens, with about 10 percent of their foreign-sourced profits booked in Bermuda, where they paid a 0.4 percent tax rate to the government there. Another 9 percent was parked in the Netherlands, where they paid 3.9 percent; and 8.3 percent in the United Kingdom (with a 10.6 percent tax rate paid there).

That came even as companies reported far more investments in tangible assets and many more employees — though fewer profits — in major markets like China, Canada, Germany and Mexico that have much higher tax rates.

For example, 10 percent of the foreign workers were in India, where companies paid an average 40 percent tax rate to the Indian government, the report said.

The report indicates GILTI is successfully taxing money squirreled away in other low-tax countries. Before the TCJA, companies could avoid taxes on that money indefinitely so long as they did not bring it back to the U.S.

But Democrats are likely to complain that the 5.5 percent GILTI rate is too much of a discount compared with the domestic 21 percent tax rate, even when taxes paid to foreign governments are taken into consideration.

The report also shows that business investments in tangible assets in the U.S. increased in 2018 by 6.4 percent. The number of employees here also grew, by 3 percent, while also growing by almost 14 percent at U.S. companies operating in other countries.

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Today's News:

"Microsoft has implemented an automatic mitigation tool within Defender Antivirus to tackle critical vulnerabilities in Exchange Server," reports ZDNet: On March 18, the Redmond giant said the software will automatically mitigate CVE-2021-26855, a severe vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild. This vulnerability is one of four that can be used in a wider attack chain to compromise on-premise Exchange servers. Microsoft released emergency fixes for the security flaws on March 2 and warned that a state-sponsored threat group called Hafnium was actively exploiting the bugs, and since then, tens of thousands of organizations are suspected to have been attacked. At least 10 other advanced persistent threat (APT) groups have jumped on the opportunity slow or fragmented patching has provided. The implementation of a recent security intelligence update for Microsoft Defender Antivirus and System Center Endpoint Protection means that mitigations will be applied on vulnerable Exchange servers when the software is deployed, without any further input from users. According to the firm, Microsoft Defender Antivirus will automatically identify if a server is vulnerable and apply the mitigation fix once per machine. The article also points out Microsoft also released a one-click mitigation tool earlier this week, which is "still readily available as an alternative way to mitigate risk to vulnerable servers if IT admins do not have Defender Antivirus."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The highly contagious variant first identified in the U.K. likely accounts for up to 30% of Covid-19 infections in the United States, White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday. From a report: The variant, called B.1.1.7, has also been reported in at least 94 countries and detected in 50 jurisdictions in the U.S., Fauci said during a White House news briefing on the pandemic, adding that the numbers are likely growing. The U.K. first identified the B.1.1.7 strain, which appears to spread more easily and quickly than other variants, last fall. It has since spread across the world, including the U.S., Fauci said. U.S. researchers have identified 5,567 cases through genetic sequencing as of Thursday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. U.S. health officials say the variant could become the dominant strain in the U.S. by the end of this month or in early April. New variants are especially a concern for public health officials as they could become more resistant to antibody treatments and vaccines. Top health officials, including Fauci, have urged Americans to get vaccinated as quickly as possible, saying the virus can't mutate if it can't infect hosts and replicate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Army second lieutenant has accused Rep. Tom Reed of sexually harassing her in 2017 when she was working as an insurance lobbyist, the Washington Post reported Friday.

Nicolette Davis said that the Republican congressman drunkenly came onto her in an Irish pub, and she alleged that he placed his hand on her thigh and unhooked her bra strap. A person seated nearby helped escort Reed out of the Minneapolis restaurant after she sought help separating herself from the New York congressman.

The two were in town as part of a weekend excursion to benefit former Rep. Erik Paulsen’s campaign, and she said she had only briefly met the congressman earlier in the trip.

Reed, who reportedly declined to be interviewed for the story, has denied the allegation.

“This account of my actions is not accurate,” Reed said in a statement to the Washington Post. Reed referred reporters in the Capitol Friday to his prior statement.

According to the Post, Davis reached out via the newspaper’s tipline in mid-February and prior to Reed telling Fox News that he is mulling a run for governor. She said she was inspired to come forward as she takes on a leadership role in the Army.

"I need to always act in good conscience and set the right example for the soldiers I will lead, including younger females,” she told the Post. “I hope it will allow people who have endured similar experiences to feel confident enough to say something.”

The article states that Davis’ account of Reed’s conduct that night was backed up by another person at the table and quotes coworkers Davis spoke to during and shortly after the alleged incident.

Reed has recently spoken out against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is facing a suite of allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct from at least six women, including several who worked for the Executive Chamber.

“These incidents of sexual harassment and pattern of abuse are abhorrent and have absolutely no place in our society, let alone the highest rungs of government," Reed said in February. "Such behavior is disturbing and unacceptable.”

The embattled governor is stiff-arming calls for him to step down, even as he has lost the confidence of both of the state’s U.S. senators and nearly every member of the New York congressional delegation.

He is also staring down ongoing investigations by federal authorities, the state attorney general and the Assembly Judiciary committee. The subjects being probed include the recent sexual harassment allegations, the Cuomo administration’s handling of Covid-related nursing home resident deaths, and its management of a high-profile bridge project the governor had named after his late father, Mario Cuomo.

While in Congress, Reed has supported efforts to combat sexual harassment and other misconduct, including a resolution requiring House members and their staff to take anti-sexual harassment training.

He has also called for Cuomo to be impeached and, along with fellow GOP Reps. Elise Stefanik and Lee Zeldin, has been discussed as a potential challenger to the three-term governor as his popularity sags amid the multifront controversies.

Davis told the Post that her decision to come forward against Reed was not politically motivated.

The shameful treatment of women in sports at the hands of the federations they play in continues to amaze and astonish, this time courtesy of the NCAA as March Madness kicks off.

Oregon Ducks player Sedona Prince went viral with a video contrasting the weight rooms provided for the women’s teams and the men’s and … wow. The women got a single rack of dumbbells and some yoga mats. As my Daily Kos coworker Jessica Sutherland responded, “I'm in my 40s with a spinal injury AND I HAVE A BETTER SETUP IN MY GARAGE.” On the other hand, the men got a weightlifting palace, basically.

The NCAA acknowledged differences in the facilities available to the teams, but in wholly dismissive fashion. There wasn't room for better facilities for women, they claimed—but as Prince and others showed, there was plenty of room. And, come on, “the athletic tournament we planned does not have adequate space for necessary athletic equipment” is not an acceptable excuse, either. 

Once the workout facilities were getting widespread attention, people started noticing some other differences. Like the swag bags given to players.

The NCAA offered a reason for this: the weather. According to NCAA Women’s vice president Lynn Holzman, the weather is different in Indianapolis and San Antonio and that’s why the men got a massive array of paraphernalia and toiletries while the women got about what you might get in the swag bag at a dumpy hobbyist conference. It’s weather that led the tournament to provide men with one product after another branded for the specific tournament while women get a couple pieces of generic NCAAW gear.

The eye-poppingly unequal array of toiletries appear to come from Unilever, a leading company on the diversity best practices inclusion index, as a company press release from 2019 bragged. Not when it comes to how they supply male and female athletes, apparently.

If you want an actual numeric count on the different value the NCAA places on women and men, check this out: the swag bags included puzzles. The men’s puzzles had 500 pieces. The women’s had 150.

Then there was the food:

The men get a huge table filled with choices. The women get a mystery substance.

This is a familiar story, of course. In soccer, members of the U.S. women’s national team—massively more successful than their male counterparts—sued for fair pay and equal working conditions, ultimately reaching a settlement on working conditions after a judge disallowed the pay portion of the suit. In ice hockey, women on the national team refused to play in the 2017 world championship if they didn’t get better pay and support.

It needs to end. These are athletes at the top of their game, in the major tournament at their level, a place they have fought for years to arrive. Treat them like it.

An otherwise meaningless game during Monday's preliminary stage of the $200,000 Magnus Carlsen Invitational left a pair of grandmasters in stitches while thrusting one of chess's most bizarre and least effective openings into the mainstream. From a report: Norway's Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura of the United States had already qualified for the knockout stage of the competition with one game left to play between them. Carlsen, the world's top-ranked player and reigning world champion, started the dead rubber typically enough by moving his king's pawn with the common 1 e4. Nakamura, the five-time US champion and current world No 18, mirrored it with 1 ... e5. And then all hell broke loose. Carlsen inched his king one space forward to the rank where his pawn had started. The self-destructive opening (2 Ke2) is known as the bongcloud for a simple reason: you'd have to be stoned to the gills to think it was a good idea. The wink-wink move immediately sent Nakamura, who's been a visible champion of the bongcloud in recent years, into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Naturally, the American played along with 2 ... Ke7, which marked the first double bongcloud ever played in a major tournament and its official entry to chess theory (namely, the Bongcloud Counter-Gambit: Hotbox Variation). "Don't do this!" cried the Hungarian grandmaster Peter Leko from the commentary booth, looking on in disbelief as the friendly rivals quickly settled for a draw by repetition after six moves. "Is this, uh, called bongcloud? Yeah? It was something like of a bongcloud business. This Ke2-Ke7 stuff. Please definitely don't try it at home. Guys, just forget about it." Why is the bongcloud so bad? For one, it manages to break practically all of the principles you're taught about chess openings from day one: it doesn't fight for the center, it leaves the king exposed and it wastes time, all while eliminating the possibility of castling and managing to impede the development of the bishop and queen. Even the worst openings tend to have some redeeming quality. The bongcloud, not so much. What makes it funny (well, not to everyone) is the idea that two of the best players on the planet would use an opening so pure in its defiance of conventional wisdom.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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