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US Politics: They're Gunnin' 4 Us


Zorral
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Report: Every Extremist Mass Killing In The US In 2022 Was Tied To The Far-Right 

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/report-every-extremist-mass-killing-in-the-us-in-2022-was-tied-to-the-far-right

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In 2022, right-wing extremists committed every ideologically driven mass killing identified in the U.S., according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

The report released Thursday found that last year, domestic extremists killed at least 25 people in the U.S. in 12 separate incidents. 18 of those 25 killings were committed in whole or in part with ideological motives. And the remaining seven either had no clear motive or were committed for a non-ideological reason.

Although extremist killings decreased in 2022 compared to 2021 — when 33 extremist-related murders took place — the trend is still concerning as an “unusually high” proportion were carried out by white supremacists, according to the ADL’s report.

The report found that 60% of the deaths tied to extremist mass killings last year came from two incidents: the racist mass shooting in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York and the mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that we live in an age of extremist mass killings,” the report said.

The number of extremist mass killings across the U.S. in the past decade is at least three times higher than any decade since the 1970s, according to the ADL.

“The 26 mass killing incidents over the past 12 years actually exceed those from the previous 40 years (20),” the report reads.

The number of deaths associated with mass killing incidents has increased, according to the report. And the numbers speak for themselves.

Between 2010 and 2020, 164 people died in ideological extremist-related mass killings, more than in any other decade except the 1990s, in which almost all the deaths were caused by the Oklahoma City bombing —  when a domestic terrorist bombed a federal building and killed 168 people.

The Idea Of The Lone, Violent White Extremist Is A Myth, And Its Dangerous
After decades of research on numerous attacks that have left scores dead, we have learned that extremists are almost always part of a pack, not lone wolves

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/the-idea-of-the-lone-violent-white-extremist-is-a-myth-and-its-dangerous

 

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Are there day of hate events/demos going on where any of you live?  They aren't even trying to hide it any longer so why do They still get so upset if people call out nazis for being nazis, racists for being racist, etc. ?

New York City faith leaders counter extremist "day of hate" with "day of resolve"

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/new-york-city-faith-leaders-counter-extremist-day-of-hate-with-day-of-resolve/

Police, rabbis urge vigilance after extremists call for "Day of Hate" Saturday

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/day-of-hate-online-threats-jewish-community/

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TENAFLY, N.J. - Police are asking people in the Jewish community to be vigilant this weekend after online threats are calling for a so-called "Day of Hate." 

There are no credible threats here, but police and rabbis are taking the issue seriously. 

"We are not afraid. We will have services just like we always do," said Rabbi Jordan Millstein of Temple Sinai of Bergen County.

Millstein says with a rise in extremist activity, security is always tight at Temple Sinai of Bergen County, and it will be even tighter this weekend. 

"We should not be cowed. It's exactly what people like this want," he said. 

The latest threat, coming in the form of social media posts, declaring Saturday a national "Day of Hate" by extremists urging others to harass and target Jewish communities.

 

 

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I remember twenty years ago when the conservatives warned that if we allowed gay marriage we'd be opening the door to all sorts of unholy stuff. Looks like they were correct:

https://www.newsweek.com/farmer-shocked-see-cat-rabbit-parenting-together-1783105

I just hope that cat gets the conversion therapy he needs and eats the rabbit. 

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On 2/26/2023 at 10:20 AM, RumHam said:

I remember twenty years ago when the conservatives warned that if we allowed gay marriage we'd be opening the door to all sorts of unholy stuff. Looks like they were correct:

https://www.newsweek.com/farmer-shocked-see-cat-rabbit-parenting-together-1783105

I just hope that cat gets the conversion therapy he needs and eats the rabbit. 

Bleh, this has happened before. Not watched Monty Python's the holy grail? Who do you think raised that rabbit????

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They keep demanding more women have more babies, but don't bother providing prenatal, birth and postnatal medical care for the women and the babies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/health/rural-hospitals-pregnancy-childbirth.html?

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Three days before Christmas, the only hospital in this remote city on the Yakama Indian Reservation abruptly closed its maternity unit without consulting the community, the doctors who delivered babies there or even its own board.

At least 35 women were planning to give birth at Astria Toppenish Hospital in January alone, and the sudden closure — which violated the hospital’s commitment to the state to maintain critical services in this rural area — threw their plans into disarray. ....

 

Maternity care is being closed in swathes across the country because it is too expensive, They Say -- i.e. it isn't making enough money to be obscenely profitable in the way implants and so on are. This is particularly the case for people who cannot buy the pricey private additional materity insurance.  But even so, if one lives where the only maternity hospital ward is hundreds of miles away, so what?

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On 2/25/2023 at 6:20 PM, RumHam said:

I remember twenty years ago when the conservatives warned that if we allowed gay marriage we'd be opening the door to all sorts of unholy stuff. Looks like they were correct:

https://www.newsweek.com/farmer-shocked-see-cat-rabbit-parenting-together-1783105

I just hope that cat gets the conversion therapy he needs and eats the rabbit. 

Scalia was concerned about bestiality, IIRC. 

Which raises an interesting question: does it count as bestiality if two animals of different species form a platonic but loving relationship ? If so, we are going to have to purge 90% of Youtube's content: animal friendship videos. 

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48 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

That’s awesome!

Awesome? Do you hate those poor Florida kids whose heads have been fried from the sun, only to be exposed to this? Why I'd never Birdie. It's almost as absurd as UPS trying to charge me nearly $150 to send you a cookbook and a stuff animal. 

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If this were submitted as a script for a television show, it would be rejected as implausible - or at least it would have been a decade back. Its almost like we are living in a Bond movie without Bond, just the villains.

Anyhow, MAGA Arizona republicans manage to implicate themselves with the cocaine cartels south of the border.

Wonder if their Florida counterparts will top that...

Arizona GOP 'voter fraud' witness implicates Trump-loving lawmaker in drug cartel bribe claims (msn.com)

 

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57 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

If this were submitted as a script for a television show, it would be rejected as implausible - or at least it would have been a decade back. Its almost like we are living in a Bond movie without Bond, just the villains.

Anyhow, MAGA Arizona republicans manage to implicate themselves with the cocaine cartels south of the border.

Wonder if their Florida counterparts will top that...

Arizona GOP 'voter fraud' witness implicates Trump-loving lawmaker in drug cartel bribe claims (msn.com)

 

I read the article and it is very confusing.  Perhaps because none of the names are familiar to me.  Further it is Trumpanista Republicans in Arizona versus more “traditional” Republicans.  I don’t know which faction everyone discussed belongs to.

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FL and devil desantis should take heed here, re Disney, etc.

The conservative battle against ‘woke’ banks is backfiring
States and cities fear that blacklisting financial giants for their climate policies will hurt their bottom line, because of reduced competition

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/28/climate-change-wall-street-investments/

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Conservatives have long held that the government should avoid interfering with private business decisions. But over the last two years, Republican state treasurers and attorneys general in Texas, Florida and other states have sought to blacklist banks that factor climate risks and social concerns into their investment decisions.

In Republican strongholds such as North Dakota, Indiana, Mississippi and Kentucky, state lawmakers have recently defeated proposals that would prohibit state governments or pension funds from doing business with the big financial institutions that have adopted ESG — environmental, sustainable and governance — goals and policies.

In North Dakota a pair of proposed laws went to crushing defeats with one losing by a 90-3 margin on Feb. 1. They were shot down, in part, by arguments that these proposals contradicted conservative principles. ....

.... In North Dakota, one big backer of anti-ESG legislation is state Rep. Bill Tveit, a Republican from Hazen who has been quoted as calling sustainable governance “a worldwide human satanic organized effort.” In an interview, he acknowledged the banking industry was upset by the original bill but is confident that an amended version can be enacted. He added that ESG proponents “want to control every inch of our lives while enhancing their fantasy green world.” ....

 

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.... On Feb. 13, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced legislation he said would protect Floridians from the “woke environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) movement.” DeSantis, who has been harping on the dangers of woke-ism, said that “by applying arbitrary ESG financial metrics that serve no one except the companies that created them, elites are circumventing the ballot box to implement a radical ideological agenda.” ....

 

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And here is FL, with so many other states actively following, such as North Dakota:

Florida Could Start Looking a Lot Like Hungary

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/opinion/desantis-higher-education-bill.html

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In 2017, the government of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban passed a law intended to drive Central European University, a prestigious school founded by a Hungarian refugee, George Soros, out of the country. At the time, this was shocking; as many as 80,000 protesters rallied in Budapest and intellectuals worldwide rushed to declare their solidarity with the demonstrators. “The fate of the university was a test of whether liberalism had the tactical savvy and emotional fortitude to beat back its new ideological foe,” wrote Franklin Foer in The Atlantic.

Liberalism, sadly, did not: The university was forced to move to Vienna, part of Orban’s lamentably successful campaign to dismantle Hungary’s liberal democracy.

That campaign has included ever-greater ideological control over education, most intensely in grade school, but also in colleges and universities. Following a landslide 2018 re-election victory that Orban saw as a “mandate to build a new era,” his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women,” said his chief of staff. In 2021, Orban extended political command over Hungarian universities by putting some schools under the authority of “public trusts” full of regime allies.

Many on the American right admire the way Orban uses the power of the state against cultural liberalism, but few are imitating him as faithfully as the Florida governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. Last week, one of DeSantis’s legislative allies filed House Bill 999, which would, as The Tampa Bay Times reported, turn many of DeSantis’s “wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law.” Even by DeSantis’s standards, it is a shocking piece of legislation that takes a sledgehammer to academic freedom. Jeremy Young, senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, described it as “almost an apocalyptic bill for higher education,” one that is “orders of magnitude worse than anything we’ve seen, either in the recent or the distant past.”

Echoing Orban, House Bill 999 bars Florida’s public colleges and universities from offering gender studies majors or minors, as well as majors or minors in critical race theory or “intersectionality,” or in any subject that “engenders beliefs” in those concepts. The bill prohibits the promotion or support of any campus activities that “espouse diversity, equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric.” This goes far beyond simply ending D.E.I. programming, and could make many campus speakers, as well as student organizations like Black student unions, verboten.

There’s more. Under House Bill 999, general education core courses couldn’t present a view of American history “contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence,” creating obvious limits on the teaching of subjects like slavery and the Native American genocide. The bill also says that general education courses shouldn’t be based on “unproven, theoretical or exploratory content,” without defining what that means. “State officials would have unfettered discretion to determine which views are ‘theoretical’ and banned from general education courses,” says a statement by the libertarian-leaning Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Finally, the bill centralizes political control over hiring by allowing faculty to be cut out of the process. Right now, some boards of trustees have the power to veto hiring recommendations made by faculty and administrators, though Young says they rarely use it. Under House Bill 999, rather than an up-or-down vote on candidates vetted by university bodies, trustees could just hire whomever they want. “They don’t even have to hire someone who applied through the regular process,” said Young. “They can just say, ‘Here’s my friend Joe, he’s going to be the new history professor.’” ....

 

 

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4 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I read the article and it is very confusing.  Perhaps because none of the names are familiar to me.  Further it is Trumpanista Republicans in Arizona versus more “traditional” Republicans.  I don’t know which faction everyone discussed belongs to.

All you need to know is the following.

1. The Trumpists love conspiracy theories and are so willing to embrace them for the likes on social media that they wasted over two hours of the state senate's time this week listening to certain allegations.

2. These allegations were that the Sinaloa drug cartel had bribed state officials and employees, both Republicans and Democrats, to fix the 2020 election.

3.  This was perfectly fine with the Trumpists, who allowed the testimony to go on, because apparently they cannot distinguish between obvious, ridiculous fantasy (why would Sinaloa spend money to fix a national election, but only in the state of Arizona) and reality.

4.  However, in the second hour of testimony, it emerged that the allegations came solely from a guy here in Scottsdale.  He accused his ex-wife and her mother of being the bag men for the cartel, and the entire testimony rested on his claims against his ex-wife and MIL.

5.  People and reporters in the chamber started googling this guy, and it turns out that accusing his wife of bizarre crimes is his hobby, to the point of being rebuked by a Federal judge for wasting the courts' time.

6.  Once this news was whispered to the Senate President, the testimony was terminated.  Red faces to match red hats all around.

Fools.

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It's kind of surprising we haven't talked about this so far, though if I've been noticing these stories about child labor here in the US, doubtless others have too.

Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.
Arriving in record numbers, they’re ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws — including in factories that make products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html

The U.S. Is Choosing Child Labor Over More Immigration

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...  Central America is home to a large number of people with the interest in and capacity to perform those roles. Opportunities for “win-win” policy-making are rarely so clear-cut.

Yet U.S. policy-makers refuse to take the win. Instead, their answer to the twin problems of a U.S. labor shortage and Central American poverty crisis is, effectively, as follows: To close the gap between job openings and available workers, the Federal Reserve will simply raise interest rates until a critical mass of Americans become too poor to afford discretionary purchases, demand for labor drops, and, in all probability, the U.S. enters a recession. Meanwhile, to mitigate the poverty of those to our south, the U.S. has been allowing Central American children to enter our country, work illegally at brutal jobs, then send remittances home to their adult family members. Specifically, we have decided to let Central American kids do this if — and only if — they embark on a roughly 2,000-mile journey to the U.S. border without a parent or guardian.

The first prong of this policy is open and intentional. The Federal Reserve has made no secret of its belief that beating inflation will require killing jobs and lowering wages. The second prong is a different story. U.S. officials have stumbled into what is in essence a child-labor trafficking policy, the cruelty and irrationality of which derive from negligence rather than intention.

Over the weekend, the New York Times published an investigation into the U.S.’s vast shadow workforce of child-migrant laborers. The paper uncovered stories of teenage roofers in Florida, delivery workers in New York City, and hotel maids in Virginia. Throughout every state in the union, across a wide variety of industries, minors from Central America are performing some of the most brutal jobs in the economy — in defiance of child labor laws. In some cases, these children were lured into the U.S. by de facto child-labor brokers who promised them comfortable homes and good schools — only to shunt the minors into 12-hour shifts, demanding that they pay back the cost of their passage. ....

 

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/labor-shortages-child-labor-migrants.html

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1157368469/child-labor-violations-increase-states-loosen-rules

https://www.reuters.com/business/us-crack-down-child-labor-amid-massive-uptick-2023-02-27/

https://www.axios.com/2023/02/27/child-labor-job-market-economy

https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20230217-1

https://www.ft.com/content/656ba14d-0c41-4d65-88ac-8ba928bdc399

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/11/us-child-labor-laws-violations

 

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21 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Snowflake... 

Both of them. The tRump demanded Kimmel be stopped from making fun of him.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/arts/television/jimmy-kimmel-trump.html

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/trump-reportedly-ordered-white-house-063931349.html

Ye olde playground bromide: "You can dish it out but you sure can't take it."

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