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solarbirdThis is the SECOND news post today. The first was all Covid-19. This is the one that focuses on Russian interference on behalf of Trump, totalitarianism, and hate groups.
I still need that drink.
----- 1 -----
Kamala Harris
twitter.com/SenKamalaHarris
21 April 2020
https://twitter.com/SenKamalaHarris/status/1252643633737629697
The facts are indisputable. My colleagues and I on the Senate Intelligence Committee agree that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and did so to help Donald Trump.
We must do everything in our power to protect our elections—now.
----- 2 -----
Bipartisan Senate report backs intel community assessment that Russia interfered to help Trump in 2016 election
By Jeremy Herb and Zachary Cohen, CNN
Tue April 21, 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/21/politics/senate-report-russia-interference/index.html
Washington (CNN)A bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee released on Tuesday has backed the US intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help then-candidate Donald Trump.
The committee's findings are a rebuke to Trump's frequent claims of a "hoax" that Russia was trying to help him win and the President's attacks on the intelligence community. The panel concluded that the Obama administration's assessment on Russian election interference was crafted without political bias, undercutting the President's claims that officials like former CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were using the intelligence community to attack him.
Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr said in a statement that the assessment reflected "strong tradecraft" and "sound analytical reasoning."
"The Committee found no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community's conclusions," the North Carolina Republican said.
----- 3 -----
Virtually all abortions again blocked in Texas
Pete Williams
20 April 2020
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/live-blog/2020-04-20-coronavirus-news-n1187556/ncrd1188316
A federal appeals court has again blocked virtually all abortions in Texas.
This time around, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has said medication abortions cannot be allowed under an order by Texas Gov. Greg Abbot that prohibits non-essential medical procedures.
Abortion is now allowed in the state only for women whose pregnancies will pass the state's limit for legal abortion by April 22.
----- 4 -----
Investigation underway after hateful messages by white nationalist group plastered in Seattle’s Chinatown International District
By Patranya Bhoolsuwan
April 20, 2020
https://iexaminer.org/investigation-underway-after-hateful-messages-by-white-nationalist-group-plastered-in-seattles-chinatown-international-district/
“I want to say that I am angry, but I am more sad”.
Business owner, Caroline Lee, shared her initial reaction to hearing the news that once again, Seattle’s Chinatown International District had become a target of hate, in light of the spread of the Covid 19 pandemic.
“I am getting concerned,” said Lee. “I am worried that things will get worse and maybe turn violent”.
On the evening of April 12th, Seattle Police said 3 men were seen placing stickers near Asian American businesses in the CID. The men were wearing face coverings and dark sunglasses. The messages on the stickers which included phrases like “Better Dead than Red” and “America First” are known white supremacist propaganda. Detectives said the men are likely associated with “Patriot Front”, a group described by the Anti-Defamation League as “alt-right white supremacist”.
“I am not surprised to hear about this happening in Seattle’s Chinatown,” said Miri Cypers, the regional director of the Pacific Northwest Region of the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL. “There’s been a real rise in bigotry and xenophobia targeting the AAPI community across the country. This pandemic is bringing out a lot of racism”.
Cypers said this though appears to be among the first threatening messages by Patriot Front, specifically targeting the Asian American community in the Pacific Northwest. According to the ADL, Patriot Front is based out of Texas and was born in the aftermath of the 2016’s deadly alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Cypers said the group has cells across the country and has been active in Western Washington in recent years. Just last spring, flyers by Patriot Front were found in nearly a dozen communities from Edmonds to Olympia. The ADL has been keeping track of activities by hate groups across the Puget Sound and Cypers said in this latest case in the CID, the location and the timing were pretty implicit.
----- 5 -----
We Won’t Know the Exact Moment When Democracy Dies
By Masha Gessen
April 16, 2020
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/we-wont-know-the-exact-moment-when-democracy-dies
In the early days of the Trump Presidency, there was a lot of speculation about when, if, and how we would pass the point of no return, when we would know that American democracy had been destroyed. That conversation faded after a while, drowned out by the din of Trumpian news. The coronavirus pandemic has brought it back. Will Trump use the virus to establish autocracy? Is American democracy dead? Just in the past few days, Trump has asserted that the Presidency gives him “total” authority, made sure that his name will appear on the stimulus checks that Americans will receive, and threatened to adjourn Congress in order to fill Administration vacancies without waiting for Senate confirmation. Is this the definitive end of American democracy? No, but only because when a democracy dies there is rarely a definitive time of death. Democracy is never pronounced dead at the scene.
Trump walked back his “total authority” claim after a day. The design of the stimulus checks will, it seems, be the result of some negotiation: Trump’s name will not appear at the top or on the signature line but, rather, in the “memo” line. (Some Republicans, such as Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, think that this is in line with tradition.) The threat to adjourn Congress may not be as radical as it sounded at first: Trump certainly didn’t invent the “recess appointment,” and in fact it was the Obama Administration that fought for the right to make such appointments during a pro-forma session (although the Supreme Court declared this an overreach of powers). At the end of the day, like at the end of so many days, all of Trump’s threats and claims can be normalized or chalked up to so much authoritarian hot air. This is exactly how autocracy works: it creeps in, staking one claim after another, but it does not firmly and finally announce its own arrival.
It has perhaps never been so clear to so many people at once how warped time can feel. Coronavirus time moves at breakneck speed and doesn’t move at all. Instead of linear time, we have time that’s loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself. So it is with autocratic time: it lurches forward, circles itself, marches in place, and leaps. In history books, time is linear, with clearly marked mileposts: the day the Bolsheviks took power; the day Hitler claimed emergency powers; the day Pol Pot marched into Phnom Penh. It is not like that in real life, not even during the pandemic.
Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, has received a lot of attention for using the coronavirus to consolidate power. He has declared an indefinite state of emergency, given himself the right to suspend any law, and instituted rule by decree. But framing these moves as the death of Hungarian democracy risks eliding the past dozen years of Hungarian history, when Orbán established a monopoly on political power, changed the constitution to reframe the understanding of the state itself, rewrote history, packed the courts, waged war on civil society, suppressed the media and educational institutions, and consolidated wealth in his inner circle.
Benjamin Netanyahu has used the pandemic to suspend most court cases in Israel and to engineer placing the Knesset on ice. Rodrigo Duterte, in the Philippines, has given himself the power of censorship. Vladimir Putin has not yet used the virus to meaningfully increase his authority, perhaps because he lacks the imagination for increasing his authority more than he already has, after twenty years of dismantling electoral institutions, suppressing the media, subjugating the courts, amassing wealth, destroying civil society, and laying the constitutional framework for eternal rule. Through all these years, Putin has claimed that Russia continues to be a democracy. The Economist’s Democracy Index places Russia a hundred and thirty-fourth out of a hundred and sixty-seven countries, tied with the Republic of the Congo and solidly in the middle of the undemocratic bottom bracket of the index. Yet Russian political scientists continue to argue about how, and when, things will reach a crisis moment, and often refer to the regime as “hybrid,” a term often used in political science to describe regimes that are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. From the inside of a country, things generally don’t look as dire as they do from the outside, because conditions are quickly normalized, because people know that things can always get worse, and because modern-day autocrats don’t generally announce when they are usurping power.
----- 6 -----
Donald Trump's Tab For MAGA Rallies Jumps to $1.8 Million as 14 Cities Say President Hasn't Paid Police Bills, Report Finds
By Alexandra Hutzler On 4/16/20
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trumps-tab-maga-rallies-jumps-18-million-14-cities-say-president-hasnt-paid-police-1498410
President Donald Trump's campaign keeps racking up unpaid bills for police and security at his MAGA rallies, according to a new report from The Center for Public Integrity.
The report, published Thursday, found that Trump's team owes a total of $1.82 million to 14 local municipalities for public safety-related costs incurred during the president's "Make America Great Again" events.
That's nearly double the amount of debt that the nonprofit investigative journalism organization found in June 2019. At that time, the president's re-election effort owed at least $841,219 to 10 city governments.
Trump's team has claimed that it's not responsible for paying the bills, though the latest campaign finance data shows they have more than enough with a $100 million war chest.
----- 7 -----
Poland Considers Law Labeling Sex Educators, LGBTQ Folks as Pedophiles
The Stop Pedophilia bill claims to protect children, but critics and educators say it's a dangerous attack on LGBTQ rights.
By Donald Padgett
April 16 2020
https://www.advocate.com/news/2020/4/16/poland-considers-law-labeling-sex-educators-lgbtq-folks-pedophiles
[EDITOR'S NOTE: This is exactly the same playbook as used by American fundamentalists for decades, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, and was specifically exported to other countries via missionary training projects.]
Polish legislators are set to debate a “Stop Pedophilia” bill that critics say is a thinly veiled attack on LGBTQ rights and school-based sex education, according to Reuters.
The law, if passed, would punish anyone who “promotes or approves sexual intercourse or other sexual activity by a minor” with up to three years in prison. The proposal, along with a similar “Stop Abortion” bill under consideration, received international condemnation.
[...]
Additionally, a third of the country has declared itself as “LGBTQ-Free” and a Catholic archbishop claimed his country was afflicted by a “rainbow plague.” In February a Polish judge refused to stop a homophobic campaign by the ultra-conservative NGO Fundacja Pro in which the group drove vans around Poland with banners and loudspeakers blaring, “Pedophilia is 20 times more common in homosexuals. They want to teach your children. Stop them!”
The proposed legislation is eerily reminiscent of the infamous 1978 Briggs Initiative in California. Officially known as Proposition 6, the ballot initiative sought to ban LGBTQ persons from working in the state’s public schools. It was defeated after a concerted effort by a group of grassroots activists including Harvey Milk and Cleve Jones.
Ola Kaczorek, co-president of the Love Does Not Exclude Association, voiced concerns of educators from across Poland about the proposed legislation .
“This would make impossible for us as educators to come into schools and teach kids about humans, about what makes us us, and what’s gender identity or sexual orientation,” she told Reuters. “Usually school is not a friendly environment for non-heterosexual kids, but now it will be even harder.”
----- 8 -----
Man Allegedly Tried Blowing Up Jewish Nursing Home Using Christian Pamphlet As Fuse
By Matt Shuham
April 16, 2020
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/man-allegedly-tried-blowing-up-jewish-nursing-home-using-christian-pamphlet-as-fuse
A Massachusetts man was arrested Wednesday for allegedly attempting to blow up a Jewish assisted living facility with a gas canister, using a Christian pamphlet as a fuse.
The canister was discovered at the entrance of Ruth’s House, a facility in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, on April 2, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts said in a statement. That was the day before someone in an extremist social media group that promoted mass killings against minorities had scheduled “jew killing day,” at the location “Jew Nursery Home.”
A member of the group specified “that jew nursing home in longmeadow massachusetts” as a potential target.
John Michael Rathbun, 36, was charged with attempted arson for allegedly leaving the canister at the nursing home’s driveway. It did not ignite, but an FBI agent said in an affidavit that blood stains on the canister matched Rathbun’s DNA.
Police subsequently received a search warrant for his residence, where they spotted several more gas canisters. Rathbun’s mother, according to the affidavit, told authorities that she prints her own Christian proselytizing pamphlets but didn’t recognize the one discovered at the scene.
----- 9 -----
Michigan's Ex-Gov. Rick Snyder Knew About Flint's Toxic Water—and Lied About It
Six years after the city of Flint, Michigan, began using a toxic water source that sickened its residents, VICE uncovered payoffs, the silencing of a whistleblower, a shady financial deal, a coverup, and the former governor who presided over it all.
by Jordan Chariton, and Jenn Dize; photos by Brittany Greeson
Apr 16 2020
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bdp9/michigans-ex-gov-rick-snyder-knew-about-flints-toxic-waterand-lied-about-it
During the inauguration of his successor, outgoing Michigan Governor Rick Snyder needed a favor.
At the January 2019 event, Snyder approached Karen Weaver, who was then the mayor of Flint, a city of nearly 100,000 people that was still reeling from financial decay and a toxic-water crisis. He asked whether she could meet with Congressman Elijah Cummings.
“You have a lot of influence with him,” Weaver remembered a worried Snyder saying to her about Cummings. At the time, Cummings was the incoming chairman of the powerful U.S. House Oversight Committee.
Throughout the water crisis, Cummings led the charge as Congress demanded Snyder and his administration provide more information about what he knew about the poisonous water that ravaged the impoverished majority-minority Rust Belt city after it switched water sources to the corrosive Flint River in 2014, and when he knew it. More specifically, Cummings pushed for more information on when Snyder first learned of the lethal Legionella pneumophila bacterial outbreak in Flint. Snyder testified to Congress that he first became aware of Legionella in January 2016 and held a press conference the next day. Flint residents didn’t believe the governor; their doubt intensified after Harvey Hollins, the director of the state’s Urban and Metropolitan Initiatives office, contradicted the governor, testifying in court that he informed Snyder about Flint’s Legionella outbreak in December 2015.
Back at the inauguration, Weaver said, Snyder asked her to get Cummings to “back off” from investigating him, emphasizing that he wanted to move on with his life as a private citizen. He said “it would go a long way” if the request to the congressman came from her, Weaver recalled to VICE. Weaver’s former spokesperson, Candice Mushatt, as well as two other sources, confirmed that she had described the governor’s request to them after it occurred. (Snyder did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story).
What Snyder didn’t know then was that Cummings and Weaver had already spoken after Democrats won control of the House in the 2018 midterm election. Weaver said Cummings disclosed his plan to compel Snyder back to Congress for additional questioning. He wanted her there. But Cummings’ death in October 2019 prevented that from occurring.
----- 10 -----
Donald Trump’s Fictional America
I grew up surrounded by Chávez’s alternate reality. Now I’m watching one consume the United States.
By ANDRÉS MIGUEL RONDÓN
April 02, 2017
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/donald-trumps-fictional-america-post-fact-venezuela-214973
“Speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplished most godlike works. It can banish fear and remove grief, and instill pleasure and enhance pity. Divine sweetness transmitted through words is inductive of pleasure and reductive of pain.” - Gorgias
If you think the postfactual world is a recent development, then you should see how Hugo Chávez was and is still mourned in Venezuela. One can safely say that the Venezuelan revolutionary, who from 1999 to 2013 presided over the largest oil boom in history in the most oil-rich country in the world, and yet left behind a hungry, ailing, economically ruined society, was a downright catastrophe for his country’s citizens. A factual catastrophe, as it were. Yet many there, especially the very poor, who are the hardest hit by Chávez’s failed policies, still idolize him as a savior. Some have even set up a religious cult around him.
Against all reason and evidence, for more than two decades they have been living in a postfactual universe.
Meanwhile, the developed world seems to be discovering this concept for the first time. As President Donald Trump and his team of surrogates lay waste to one fact after another, the Western media is brimming with lamentations about our entry into the post-factual era and eulogies for the “factual” one we left behind. In these essays, post-truthism is typically defined as some sort of illness of objectivity, brought on by a rise in subjectivity and sheer emotion. “The truth has become so devalued,” they say, “that what was once the gold standard of political debate is a worthless currency.”
But take it from someone who grew up in Venezuela, surrounded by a fictional universe of Chávez’s making: These interpretations are all wrong. For one, they assume that the scientific understanding of the world is somehow the natural route—the obvious one, the longstanding one—when in fact, blind faith was until very recently the unvarying constant of civilization. For most of our human history, we lived to survive, and when faced by doubt we were not embarrassed by beliefs that required no verification. But now, late in the age of Google, we are led to believe that that which cannot be verified is somehow immediately worthless. As if we really live in the complex world of facts, and not the more human world of belief.
I still need that drink.
- Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and did so to help Donald Trump. [YES THIS IS NEW]
- Bipartisan Senate report backs intel community assessment that Russia interfered to help Trump in 2016 election [YES THIS IS NEW]
- Virtually all abortions again blocked in Texas
- Investigation underway after hateful messages by white nationalist group plastered in Seattle’s Chinatown International District
- We Won’t Know the Exact Moment When Democracy Dies
- Donald Trump's Tab For MAGA Rallies Jumps to $1.8 Million as 14 Cities Say President Hasn't Paid Police Bills, Report Finds
- Poland Considers Law Labeling Sex Educators, LGBTQ Folks as Pedophiles
- Man Allegedly Tried Blowing Up Jewish Nursing Home Using Christian Pamphlet As Fuse
- Michigan's Ex-Gov. Rick Snyder Knew About Flint's Toxic Water—and Lied About It
- Donald Trump’s Fictional America
----- 1 -----
Kamala Harris
twitter.com/SenKamalaHarris
21 April 2020
https://twitter.com/SenKamalaHarris/status/1252643633737629697
The facts are indisputable. My colleagues and I on the Senate Intelligence Committee agree that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and did so to help Donald Trump.
We must do everything in our power to protect our elections—now.
----- 2 -----
Bipartisan Senate report backs intel community assessment that Russia interfered to help Trump in 2016 election
By Jeremy Herb and Zachary Cohen, CNN
Tue April 21, 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/21/politics/senate-report-russia-interference/index.html
Washington (CNN)A bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee released on Tuesday has backed the US intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help then-candidate Donald Trump.
The committee's findings are a rebuke to Trump's frequent claims of a "hoax" that Russia was trying to help him win and the President's attacks on the intelligence community. The panel concluded that the Obama administration's assessment on Russian election interference was crafted without political bias, undercutting the President's claims that officials like former CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were using the intelligence community to attack him.
Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr said in a statement that the assessment reflected "strong tradecraft" and "sound analytical reasoning."
"The Committee found no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community's conclusions," the North Carolina Republican said.
----- 3 -----
Virtually all abortions again blocked in Texas
Pete Williams
20 April 2020
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/live-blog/2020-04-20-coronavirus-news-n1187556/ncrd1188316
A federal appeals court has again blocked virtually all abortions in Texas.
This time around, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has said medication abortions cannot be allowed under an order by Texas Gov. Greg Abbot that prohibits non-essential medical procedures.
Abortion is now allowed in the state only for women whose pregnancies will pass the state's limit for legal abortion by April 22.
----- 4 -----
Investigation underway after hateful messages by white nationalist group plastered in Seattle’s Chinatown International District
By Patranya Bhoolsuwan
April 20, 2020
https://iexaminer.org/investigation-underway-after-hateful-messages-by-white-nationalist-group-plastered-in-seattles-chinatown-international-district/
“I want to say that I am angry, but I am more sad”.
Business owner, Caroline Lee, shared her initial reaction to hearing the news that once again, Seattle’s Chinatown International District had become a target of hate, in light of the spread of the Covid 19 pandemic.
“I am getting concerned,” said Lee. “I am worried that things will get worse and maybe turn violent”.
On the evening of April 12th, Seattle Police said 3 men were seen placing stickers near Asian American businesses in the CID. The men were wearing face coverings and dark sunglasses. The messages on the stickers which included phrases like “Better Dead than Red” and “America First” are known white supremacist propaganda. Detectives said the men are likely associated with “Patriot Front”, a group described by the Anti-Defamation League as “alt-right white supremacist”.
“I am not surprised to hear about this happening in Seattle’s Chinatown,” said Miri Cypers, the regional director of the Pacific Northwest Region of the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL. “There’s been a real rise in bigotry and xenophobia targeting the AAPI community across the country. This pandemic is bringing out a lot of racism”.
Cypers said this though appears to be among the first threatening messages by Patriot Front, specifically targeting the Asian American community in the Pacific Northwest. According to the ADL, Patriot Front is based out of Texas and was born in the aftermath of the 2016’s deadly alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Cypers said the group has cells across the country and has been active in Western Washington in recent years. Just last spring, flyers by Patriot Front were found in nearly a dozen communities from Edmonds to Olympia. The ADL has been keeping track of activities by hate groups across the Puget Sound and Cypers said in this latest case in the CID, the location and the timing were pretty implicit.
----- 5 -----
We Won’t Know the Exact Moment When Democracy Dies
By Masha Gessen
April 16, 2020
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/we-wont-know-the-exact-moment-when-democracy-dies
In the early days of the Trump Presidency, there was a lot of speculation about when, if, and how we would pass the point of no return, when we would know that American democracy had been destroyed. That conversation faded after a while, drowned out by the din of Trumpian news. The coronavirus pandemic has brought it back. Will Trump use the virus to establish autocracy? Is American democracy dead? Just in the past few days, Trump has asserted that the Presidency gives him “total” authority, made sure that his name will appear on the stimulus checks that Americans will receive, and threatened to adjourn Congress in order to fill Administration vacancies without waiting for Senate confirmation. Is this the definitive end of American democracy? No, but only because when a democracy dies there is rarely a definitive time of death. Democracy is never pronounced dead at the scene.
Trump walked back his “total authority” claim after a day. The design of the stimulus checks will, it seems, be the result of some negotiation: Trump’s name will not appear at the top or on the signature line but, rather, in the “memo” line. (Some Republicans, such as Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, think that this is in line with tradition.) The threat to adjourn Congress may not be as radical as it sounded at first: Trump certainly didn’t invent the “recess appointment,” and in fact it was the Obama Administration that fought for the right to make such appointments during a pro-forma session (although the Supreme Court declared this an overreach of powers). At the end of the day, like at the end of so many days, all of Trump’s threats and claims can be normalized or chalked up to so much authoritarian hot air. This is exactly how autocracy works: it creeps in, staking one claim after another, but it does not firmly and finally announce its own arrival.
It has perhaps never been so clear to so many people at once how warped time can feel. Coronavirus time moves at breakneck speed and doesn’t move at all. Instead of linear time, we have time that’s loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself. So it is with autocratic time: it lurches forward, circles itself, marches in place, and leaps. In history books, time is linear, with clearly marked mileposts: the day the Bolsheviks took power; the day Hitler claimed emergency powers; the day Pol Pot marched into Phnom Penh. It is not like that in real life, not even during the pandemic.
Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, has received a lot of attention for using the coronavirus to consolidate power. He has declared an indefinite state of emergency, given himself the right to suspend any law, and instituted rule by decree. But framing these moves as the death of Hungarian democracy risks eliding the past dozen years of Hungarian history, when Orbán established a monopoly on political power, changed the constitution to reframe the understanding of the state itself, rewrote history, packed the courts, waged war on civil society, suppressed the media and educational institutions, and consolidated wealth in his inner circle.
Benjamin Netanyahu has used the pandemic to suspend most court cases in Israel and to engineer placing the Knesset on ice. Rodrigo Duterte, in the Philippines, has given himself the power of censorship. Vladimir Putin has not yet used the virus to meaningfully increase his authority, perhaps because he lacks the imagination for increasing his authority more than he already has, after twenty years of dismantling electoral institutions, suppressing the media, subjugating the courts, amassing wealth, destroying civil society, and laying the constitutional framework for eternal rule. Through all these years, Putin has claimed that Russia continues to be a democracy. The Economist’s Democracy Index places Russia a hundred and thirty-fourth out of a hundred and sixty-seven countries, tied with the Republic of the Congo and solidly in the middle of the undemocratic bottom bracket of the index. Yet Russian political scientists continue to argue about how, and when, things will reach a crisis moment, and often refer to the regime as “hybrid,” a term often used in political science to describe regimes that are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. From the inside of a country, things generally don’t look as dire as they do from the outside, because conditions are quickly normalized, because people know that things can always get worse, and because modern-day autocrats don’t generally announce when they are usurping power.
----- 6 -----
Donald Trump's Tab For MAGA Rallies Jumps to $1.8 Million as 14 Cities Say President Hasn't Paid Police Bills, Report Finds
By Alexandra Hutzler On 4/16/20
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trumps-tab-maga-rallies-jumps-18-million-14-cities-say-president-hasnt-paid-police-1498410
President Donald Trump's campaign keeps racking up unpaid bills for police and security at his MAGA rallies, according to a new report from The Center for Public Integrity.
The report, published Thursday, found that Trump's team owes a total of $1.82 million to 14 local municipalities for public safety-related costs incurred during the president's "Make America Great Again" events.
That's nearly double the amount of debt that the nonprofit investigative journalism organization found in June 2019. At that time, the president's re-election effort owed at least $841,219 to 10 city governments.
Trump's team has claimed that it's not responsible for paying the bills, though the latest campaign finance data shows they have more than enough with a $100 million war chest.
----- 7 -----
Poland Considers Law Labeling Sex Educators, LGBTQ Folks as Pedophiles
The Stop Pedophilia bill claims to protect children, but critics and educators say it's a dangerous attack on LGBTQ rights.
By Donald Padgett
April 16 2020
https://www.advocate.com/news/2020/4/16/poland-considers-law-labeling-sex-educators-lgbtq-folks-pedophiles
[EDITOR'S NOTE: This is exactly the same playbook as used by American fundamentalists for decades, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, and was specifically exported to other countries via missionary training projects.]
Polish legislators are set to debate a “Stop Pedophilia” bill that critics say is a thinly veiled attack on LGBTQ rights and school-based sex education, according to Reuters.
The law, if passed, would punish anyone who “promotes or approves sexual intercourse or other sexual activity by a minor” with up to three years in prison. The proposal, along with a similar “Stop Abortion” bill under consideration, received international condemnation.
[...]
Additionally, a third of the country has declared itself as “LGBTQ-Free” and a Catholic archbishop claimed his country was afflicted by a “rainbow plague.” In February a Polish judge refused to stop a homophobic campaign by the ultra-conservative NGO Fundacja Pro in which the group drove vans around Poland with banners and loudspeakers blaring, “Pedophilia is 20 times more common in homosexuals. They want to teach your children. Stop them!”
The proposed legislation is eerily reminiscent of the infamous 1978 Briggs Initiative in California. Officially known as Proposition 6, the ballot initiative sought to ban LGBTQ persons from working in the state’s public schools. It was defeated after a concerted effort by a group of grassroots activists including Harvey Milk and Cleve Jones.
Ola Kaczorek, co-president of the Love Does Not Exclude Association, voiced concerns of educators from across Poland about the proposed legislation .
“This would make impossible for us as educators to come into schools and teach kids about humans, about what makes us us, and what’s gender identity or sexual orientation,” she told Reuters. “Usually school is not a friendly environment for non-heterosexual kids, but now it will be even harder.”
----- 8 -----
Man Allegedly Tried Blowing Up Jewish Nursing Home Using Christian Pamphlet As Fuse
By Matt Shuham
April 16, 2020
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/man-allegedly-tried-blowing-up-jewish-nursing-home-using-christian-pamphlet-as-fuse
A Massachusetts man was arrested Wednesday for allegedly attempting to blow up a Jewish assisted living facility with a gas canister, using a Christian pamphlet as a fuse.
The canister was discovered at the entrance of Ruth’s House, a facility in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, on April 2, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts said in a statement. That was the day before someone in an extremist social media group that promoted mass killings against minorities had scheduled “jew killing day,” at the location “Jew Nursery Home.”
A member of the group specified “that jew nursing home in longmeadow massachusetts” as a potential target.
John Michael Rathbun, 36, was charged with attempted arson for allegedly leaving the canister at the nursing home’s driveway. It did not ignite, but an FBI agent said in an affidavit that blood stains on the canister matched Rathbun’s DNA.
Police subsequently received a search warrant for his residence, where they spotted several more gas canisters. Rathbun’s mother, according to the affidavit, told authorities that she prints her own Christian proselytizing pamphlets but didn’t recognize the one discovered at the scene.
----- 9 -----
Michigan's Ex-Gov. Rick Snyder Knew About Flint's Toxic Water—and Lied About It
Six years after the city of Flint, Michigan, began using a toxic water source that sickened its residents, VICE uncovered payoffs, the silencing of a whistleblower, a shady financial deal, a coverup, and the former governor who presided over it all.
by Jordan Chariton, and Jenn Dize; photos by Brittany Greeson
Apr 16 2020
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bdp9/michigans-ex-gov-rick-snyder-knew-about-flints-toxic-waterand-lied-about-it
During the inauguration of his successor, outgoing Michigan Governor Rick Snyder needed a favor.
At the January 2019 event, Snyder approached Karen Weaver, who was then the mayor of Flint, a city of nearly 100,000 people that was still reeling from financial decay and a toxic-water crisis. He asked whether she could meet with Congressman Elijah Cummings.
“You have a lot of influence with him,” Weaver remembered a worried Snyder saying to her about Cummings. At the time, Cummings was the incoming chairman of the powerful U.S. House Oversight Committee.
Throughout the water crisis, Cummings led the charge as Congress demanded Snyder and his administration provide more information about what he knew about the poisonous water that ravaged the impoverished majority-minority Rust Belt city after it switched water sources to the corrosive Flint River in 2014, and when he knew it. More specifically, Cummings pushed for more information on when Snyder first learned of the lethal Legionella pneumophila bacterial outbreak in Flint. Snyder testified to Congress that he first became aware of Legionella in January 2016 and held a press conference the next day. Flint residents didn’t believe the governor; their doubt intensified after Harvey Hollins, the director of the state’s Urban and Metropolitan Initiatives office, contradicted the governor, testifying in court that he informed Snyder about Flint’s Legionella outbreak in December 2015.
Back at the inauguration, Weaver said, Snyder asked her to get Cummings to “back off” from investigating him, emphasizing that he wanted to move on with his life as a private citizen. He said “it would go a long way” if the request to the congressman came from her, Weaver recalled to VICE. Weaver’s former spokesperson, Candice Mushatt, as well as two other sources, confirmed that she had described the governor’s request to them after it occurred. (Snyder did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story).
What Snyder didn’t know then was that Cummings and Weaver had already spoken after Democrats won control of the House in the 2018 midterm election. Weaver said Cummings disclosed his plan to compel Snyder back to Congress for additional questioning. He wanted her there. But Cummings’ death in October 2019 prevented that from occurring.
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Donald Trump’s Fictional America
I grew up surrounded by Chávez’s alternate reality. Now I’m watching one consume the United States.
By ANDRÉS MIGUEL RONDÓN
April 02, 2017
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/donald-trumps-fictional-america-post-fact-venezuela-214973
“Speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplished most godlike works. It can banish fear and remove grief, and instill pleasure and enhance pity. Divine sweetness transmitted through words is inductive of pleasure and reductive of pain.” - Gorgias
If you think the postfactual world is a recent development, then you should see how Hugo Chávez was and is still mourned in Venezuela. One can safely say that the Venezuelan revolutionary, who from 1999 to 2013 presided over the largest oil boom in history in the most oil-rich country in the world, and yet left behind a hungry, ailing, economically ruined society, was a downright catastrophe for his country’s citizens. A factual catastrophe, as it were. Yet many there, especially the very poor, who are the hardest hit by Chávez’s failed policies, still idolize him as a savior. Some have even set up a religious cult around him.
Against all reason and evidence, for more than two decades they have been living in a postfactual universe.
Meanwhile, the developed world seems to be discovering this concept for the first time. As President Donald Trump and his team of surrogates lay waste to one fact after another, the Western media is brimming with lamentations about our entry into the post-factual era and eulogies for the “factual” one we left behind. In these essays, post-truthism is typically defined as some sort of illness of objectivity, brought on by a rise in subjectivity and sheer emotion. “The truth has become so devalued,” they say, “that what was once the gold standard of political debate is a worthless currency.”
But take it from someone who grew up in Venezuela, surrounded by a fictional universe of Chávez’s making: These interpretations are all wrong. For one, they assume that the scientific understanding of the world is somehow the natural route—the obvious one, the longstanding one—when in fact, blind faith was until very recently the unvarying constant of civilization. For most of our human history, we lived to survive, and when faced by doubt we were not embarrassed by beliefs that required no verification. But now, late in the age of Google, we are led to believe that that which cannot be verified is somehow immediately worthless. As if we really live in the complex world of facts, and not the more human world of belief.
