Over Thanksgiving weekend, I wrote about a longtime friend, “Kathleen,” who learned—on Halloween, of all days—that she had a severely damaged liver. According to her doctor, the likely culprits were cancer or complications from four bouts with COVID-19. Despite being fully vaccinated, Kathleen was still at risk for COVID, due to having Type 1 diabetes.
There are times over the last three-plus years that I’ve wondered if I’ve been a little too heavy-handed in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. Those questions cropped up anew after Emily Oster of The Atlantic suggested that we declare a “pandemic amnesty” for how we reacted when the pandemic first mushroomed. With few exceptions, even though I’m vaccinated and boosted, I still wear a mask indoors. I also have a hair trigger for displays of covidiocy on social media.
A woman in Omaha, Nebraska, recently discovered that the person who had been vandalizing her car was actually a police officer. The officer was allowed to resign rather than face all-but-certain termination. Even though he punctured one of her tires on one occasion, he only received a citation for criminal mischief.
This is an absolutely appalling situation that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention.
When Elon Musk closed on his purchase of Twitter on Thursday, a lot of left-leaning Twitter users either left the platform or announced their intention to do so. I had considered jumping ship if Musk got his hands on Twitter, but any inclination to do so went out the window when I learned that Musk was buying Twitter by way of a leveraged buyout.
On Tuesday night, Chris Cuomo made one of his first on-air appearances anywhere since being fired from CNN last December over his role in helping his brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, fend off accusations of sexual harassment. Cuomo’s appearance came on NewsNation, the fledgling news channel that replaced WGN America.
The bill finally came due for Josh Duggar on Wednesday. More than six months after being convicted of receiving and possessing child sex abuse material, the oldest scion of America’s most infamous babymakers (and unfit parents) was sentenced to 12.5 years in prison, followed by 20 years of supervised release. While on supervised release, Duggar will have to register as a sex offender and will not be allowed any unsupervised contact with minors—not even members of his own family.
At Daily Kos, our goal is to elect and support more and better Democrats. For a long time, it appeared that Rep. Marie Newman met that standard and then some. It’s why many of us supported her when she challenged Chicago machine scion Rep. Dan Lipinski in the Democratic primary for Illinois’s Third Congressional District in 2018.
It may seem that the Republican Party is willing to condone racism. After all, Donald Trump still has the GOP very much in his thrall, despite his penchant for blowing racist yacht horns—like calling Democratic lawmakers “savages” when he was attacking a Latina, two Black people, a Palestinian, and two Jews. But the GOP is okay with people of color—just as long as they’re line-drawing conservatives. Take the word of Sen.
The phrase “police brutality” has often been associated with officers beating or killing innocent people, most often people of color. For over a year now, what often comes to mind is the Facebook video of George Floyd gasping for breath under the knee of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis officer who has since been convicted of Floyd’s murder.
When the history books reflect on Donald Trump’s presidency, the religious right’s unflinching support of him will surely get a lot of ink. Trump promised the religious right everything it wanted and then some—particularly conservative federal judges and Supreme Court justices who would roll back abortion and marriage equality.
It is obvious why the religious right supported Trump.
There are a lot of people who think Attorney General Merrick Garland is a 98-pound weakling. In their eyes, the lack of any action against Donald Trump and others who incited the Jan. 6 insurrection suggests that Garland isn’t willing to bring justice to those responsible for that day’s horror.
A quick read of recent events shows Garland is anything but a weakling.
When Infowars and Alex Jones were slapped with a default judgment for their years-long smearing of the Sandy Hook families in October, I believed that it would likely have the effect of putting them out of business. Now it looks like another deplorable agitprop shop may be the next to be potentially sued into oblivion: Gateway Pundit and its impresario, Jim Hoft.
Those wondering why no jurisdiction has actually brought criminal charges against Donald Trump and his minions need to remember that when done properly, a criminal investigation is supposed to take time. A good prosecutor is supposed to build a Mount Everest-sized trove of evidence against a defendant—and do so in a way that the defendant’s claim of innocence is slowly and painstakingly strangled.
For most of us, it’s an article of faith that Donald Trump is responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection, regardless of Republican sentators’ refusal to vote for a conviction in his second impeachment. But a prominent legal scholar believes there’s another way to hold Trump to account for that day’s horror. He believes that Trump can be prosecuted not for what he did that day, but for what he didn’t do.
Content warning: Discussion of domestic violence.
For much of the second half of the Obama administration, Iranian-born pastor Saeed Abedini was the face of persecuted Christians around the world. He spent almost four years in an Iranian prison on trumped-up charges of endangering national security. In truth, he had been ensnared in the heavy-handed persecution that Christians in Iran have long faced under the mullahs.
A lot of people in the Donald Trump administration had qualifications so questionable that they had us wondering, “What are they doing there?” That question was especially loud when it came to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. In case you don’t recall, DeVos had no background whatsoever in education and no real concept of what her department was supposed to do.
Until this week, the most outrageous thing I’ve seen in my 29 years as a political junkie was the religious right’s four-year campaign to bully the American people into bowing down to Donald Trump. In hindsight, I got a foreshadowing of this when I spent the first six months of my freshman year at the University of North Carolina in the belly of the religious right beast.
There’s no denying it: The Donald Trump era exposed serious deficits in our democratic process. While the For the People Act and numerous other state and federal proposals aim to fix them, the biggest problem of all is something that can’t be fixed by mere legislation: the Electoral College.
Let’s not beat around the bush.
There are indications that Saturday’s “Justice for J6” rally is going to be a giant dud. For one, some of the leading members of the House Sedition Caucus are shying away from it—even people like Reps. Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Never mind that the guy organizing this effort to wail that those arrested for their roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection get “justice” is a former Donald Trump campaign staffer.
In case you missed it, the latest entry in the debate over charter schools involves Bishop Sycamore, a supposed charter school in Columbus, Ohio, that wrangled a nationally televised game on ESPN by claiming it had a roster full of Division I recruits. However, questions started cropping up when ESPN’s own announcers revealed that no one from Bishop Sycamore appeared in any national databases.
Content warning: This story discusses the sex trafficking of minors.
In the last two years, when we’ve thought of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, we’ve thought about it as a superspreader waiting to happen. Remember, this was one of many acts of incompetence by arguably the nation’s most incompetent governor, South Dakota’s Kristi Noem.
Earlier this week, entrepreneur and “Bitcoin millionaire” Erik Finman introduced a new smartphone called the “Freedom Phone.” He billed it as a phone tailor-made for conservatives who fear being censored by those evil deep staters in Silicon Valley. Not only does this phone supposedly not collect your data, but it has its own “PatriApp” store that doesn’t boot off apps.
But as Daily Kos’ Aldous J.
In recent months, we Americans have found ourselves in an odd position: rooting for faceless corporations. Specifically, rooting for voting technology companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, which have filed billion-dollar defamation lawsuits against a number of right-wing figures who promoted Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him through massive fraud.
By now, most of you have seen that Mike Lindell filed an absolutely bonkers lawsuit against Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. It’s a virtual witches’ brew of conspiracy theories and “six degrees of separation.” The odds of this suit going anywhere were only slightly better than finding a needle in a haystack.
Well, the MyPillow Guy’s odds just narrowed considerably.
These days, there’s a pretty crowded field in the race for “worst member of Congress,” but Rep. Paul Gosar proved Friday why he is firmly among the top contenders. As Senate Republicans blocked the Jan. 6 commission, the Arizona Republican got the bright idea to pay tribute to a Jan. 6 insurrectionist.
See for yourself.
They took her life. They could not take her pride. #onemoreinthenameoflove https://t.
When Facebook’s Oversight Board upheld Facebook’s decision to lock Donald Trump out of his Facebook and Instagram accounts, it should have been bad news to the rabidly pro-Trump, charismatic Pentecostal “prophets” who have been insisting that Trump’s return to the White House is nigh. After all, it’s pretty clear that Trump made the board’s decision for it with his obstinate insistence that he had victory stolen from him.
Yesterday, Right Wing Watch flagged a video in which Mike Lindell told Steve Bannon that he was about to introduce a lawsuit that would all but assure Donald Trump would be back in office by the end of the summer. Dollars to donuts it’s based on some of the same lies that not only got the MyPillow Guy booted from Twitter, but have him staring down the barrel of a billion-dollar lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems.
I’ve spent most of my life no more than 20 minutes from the border of South Carolina. But there are times when the distance between my home in Charlotte and the South Carolina line feels more like two different worlds. One of those times came in February, when Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bill that had the effect of banning almost all abortions in South Carolina.
The bill, which can be read in full here, is the latest attempt at a “heartbeat bill.
Over the years, I’ve watched as a lot of my fellow lefties have either unfriended or snoozed many of their pro-Trump friends on Facebook. The reasons are more or less the same: They can’t have people in their lives who could see Donald Trump’s boorish and criminal behavior, as well as his cruel policies, and still vote for him.
I was reluctant to do so, especially since there weren’t too many out-and-out deplorables among my Facebook friends.
Over the years, I’ve watched as a lot of my fellow lefties have either unfriended or snoozed many of their pro-Trump friends on Facebook. The reasons are more or less the same: They can’t have people in their lives who could see Donald Trump’s boorish and criminal behavior, as well as his cruel policies, and still vote for him.
I was reluctant to do so, especially since there weren’t too many out-and-out deplorables among my Facebook friends.