Our Constitutional Republic faces a clear and present danger more deadly than that of the Civil War. The danger is the Republican Party, a "political party" that has sold out to white supremacy, autocracy, misogyny, and hatred of everything our Nation stands for. Republicans dismiss any sense of a common American narrative. The "Republican Party" is an outlier in our history – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of social and economic policies that have sustained us for a century; unwilling to compromise; dismissive of evidence, fact, and science; dismissive of the legitimacy of any viewpoint except their own. America needs to face the simple, frightening fact that the Republican Party is a clear and present danger to our Constitutional Republic.
After this ignorant tweet, Boebert quickly drew criticism for taking multiple attempts to pass her GED while Maddow got her bachelors from Stanford and doctorate from Oxford. It was Boebert’s clumsy way of harkening back to an age-old argument by Republicans that Democrats are elitists because they support and promote education.
You probably remember this photograph . . . it’s one of the more iconic of the awful images of the Nazi torch march at Charlottesville VA on August 11, 2017.
On August 12,2017, the man in the center was elated to see himself on the cover of papers across the county.
Today, I am pleased to tell you he is dead.
Teddy Joseph Von Nukem (yes, that’s his real name), one of the most prominent faces lit by the glow of tiki torches in what became the lasting image of the 2017 white supremacist Nazi rally in Charlottesville, killed himself as he was due to face criminal trial last month.
The 35-year-old skipped out on his first day of trial for a drug trafficking charge in Arizona on the morning of Jan. 30, according to court records. At the very moment a federal judge was issuing a warrant for his arrest, Von Nukem was actually still at his home in Missouri, where he had walked out in the snow behind the hay shed and shot himself.
The details were listed in an autopsy report obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast on Tuesday.
“Suicide notes were found at the scene, left for law enforcement and his children, however handwriting was somewhat inconsistent,” the coroner’s report states..
In lockstep with a number of MAGA Republicans complaining that the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio is “proof” that the Biden administration has started a “war against white people,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) took to the airwaves on Tuesday night to help spread the meme.
During an appearance on Fox New’s Tuesday edition of Hannity, Greene claimed that that money targeting rail safety in the U.S. House’s bipartisan infrastructure bill was insufficient. And that’s why she didn’t vote for it.
“We need to make sure that our rails are safe. Democrats passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and only $5 billion went toward rail safety. This is a failure. It would’ve never happened under a Republican-controlled infrastructure bill,” Greene said.
Fox News’ Sean Hannity began the segment by asking, “I don’t hear anything from the New Green Deal climate alarmist cult about what is an environmental disaster by every measure. Why?”
Greene responded by accusing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other Democrats of only giving lip service to derailment-related wildlife deaths, saying, “Train derailment is happening every single day. And now, thousands of people, birds and animals,…they’re all sick and we don’t know the consequences of this horrible accident in East Palestine. But we have people like Ilhan Omar. She wants to crack down on corporate greed when it comes to rails and the privately-owned sections of rails.”
Greene then set her sights on lambasting Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
“But the real problem, Sean, is Pete Buttigieg,” Greene argued. “He’s more interested in equity and inclusion in his hiring practices, and grant-giving schemes.”
The infrastructure bill was passed in August 2022. That’s six months ago. If you think you can undertake “dirt-digging” on an major infrastructure project, you really have to learn how things in the real world work. Oh, and Greene voted against it. We remember that. And Georgia, you deserve better.
I noticed that no one mentioned the Trump rollback of train braking safety regulations?
Neither Hannity nor Green has read all 14 pages of the Green New Deal because it has words and not pictures.
I have to admit, Marjorie Taylor Greene has a certain appeal. Watching her is akin to a train derailment or a gruesome injury. It’s horrible to look at, but you just can’t help yourself. I just have to see what she does next. Masked Singer, perhaps?
Plato (in The Republic) was the father of the “noble lie,” a tale told to people “for their own good and that of society” even though it was utterly untrue. Almost twenty-five-hundred years later, the noble lie lives on in some Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs).
A clear description of CPCs came from the Neeva.com AI-driven search engine:
“Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are anti-abortion clinics with a hidden agenda and part of an industry built on misleading pregnant people with scare tactics and lies. They are designed to look like real health centers, but their goal is to scare, shame, or pressure people out of getting an abortion and to spread lies about abortion, birth control, and sexual health. CPCs are dangerous, predatory organizations and a risk to public health.”
And they and their affiliated groups are hauling in a boatload of money. Over $4 billion dollars a year according to the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) — much of it government money, millions taken out of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) funds — flows to CPCs. One-fifth of our states, all under Republican control, now directly fund these organizations with taxpayer money.
Just the top ten groups running CPCs across the country raked in, NCRP says, over $2.2 billion last year, although how much of that went specifically to discourage women from getting abortions is uncertain.
Texas gave $200 million in taxpayer dollars to CPCs over the past two years. During his State of the State address last week, Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee proposed giving CPCs in his state $100 million.
The noble lie trend is moving fast across Red states nationwide.
A database compiled by Reproaction found over 2600 CPCs across the country, many located next door to abortion clinics or Planned Parenthood clinics, where they attempt to fool and thus intercept women before they can enter the real clinics.
When Olivia Raisner, an investigative reporter with health education nonprofit Mayday, visited a CPC in Indianapolis for an article three months ago in MS Magazine, she noted how the waiting area and exam room were exactly what you’d expect when visiting a high-end doctor’s office.
Her urine test was positive because she’d smuggled in a bottle of a pregnant friend’s urine, so the first noble lie the faux clinician told her was:
“The girls that get abortions do end up with high suicide rates.”
Following that lie, she was told that if she got an abortion she’d experience depression for the rest of her life and that if she later has a child she “won’t be able to fully love him, because I’ll always be reminded that I took away his brother or sister.”
That lie was followed by the serial lies that abortion will scar her Fallopian tubes and that she’d risk bulimia, anorexia, and infertility.
None of those assertions are true.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, did a ten-year, 1000-patient study of women who got abortions and women who’d wanted or tried to get abortions but, for various reasons, were turned away.
It was the first major study of its sort, and was turned into a 2021 book titled The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, A Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having – or Being Denied – an Abortion.
Their findings are sobering. As summarized on the UCSF’s ANSIRI website, women who were unwillingly forced to carry their pregnancies to term were, according to actual science and research:
—“More likely to experience serious complications from the end of pregnancy including eclampsia and death.
—“More likely to stay tethered to abusive partners.
— “More likely to suffer anxiety and loss of self-esteem in the short term after being denied abortion.
— “Less likely to have aspirational life plans for the coming year.
— “More likely to experience poor physical health for years after the pregnancy, including chronic pain and gestational hypertension.”
They also determined that:
“[B]eing denied abortion has serious implications for the children born of unwanted pregnancy, as well as for the existing children in the family.”
And they found, supporting previous research, that women denied abortions were four times more likely to end up in poverty and, on the other hand:
“[W]omen who have an abortion are not more likely than those denied the procedure to have depression, anxiety, or suicidal ideation. We find that 95% of women report that having the abortion was the right decision for them over five years after the procedure.” [emphasis added]
Pro-Choice North Carolina compiled a list of the top ten noble lies CPCs in that state had told women who came looking for abortions. They were:
— Lie #1: Abortion causes breast cancer.
— Lie #2: You’ll never have children if you have an abortion.
— Lie #3: Condoms don’t work.
— Lie #4: The abortion pill, or a ‘chemical abortion,’ is dangerous and not medically safe for women.
— Lie #5: Birth control and emergency contraception (i.e., the “morning-after pill” or “Plan B”) cause abortions.
— Lie #6: Abortion causes permanent psychological and mental damage, including “post-abortion syndrome”
— Lie #7: Abortions cost much more than carrying your baby to term.
— Lie #8: Surgical abortion can kill you.
— Lie #9: You have plenty of time to make a decision. One-third of all pregnancies end in miscarriages anyway. (This is intended to push women beyond the legal time limit for abortion.)
— Lie #10: Your baby can already smell and hear you.
CPCs are growing increasingly sophisticated in their targeting of women looking for abortion services. As Kylie Cheung wrote for Jezebel:
“Anti-abortion groups are already taking advantage of digital platforms to spy on people, from funding and partnering with fertility apps that track people’s periods to reportedly using mobile geo-fencing technology to bombard patients at or en route to abortion clinics with targeted, anti-abortion propaganda ads.”
This week the Tech Transparency Project broke the news that Google, in apparent violation of their own policy against deceptive advertising, has been driving ads and links from CPCs to as many as 56% of women searching for abortion facilities near them.
A typical CPC ad, The Guardian reported Tuesday, has the headline “Free Abortion Help – 100% Confidential.”
And it’s apparently not just Google. The investigative reporting website Reveal reported last June:
“Facebook is collecting ultra-sensitive personal data about abortion seekers and enabling anti-abortion organizations to use that data as a tool to target and influence people online, in violation of its own policies and promises.”
Just as alarming, what happens at CPCs doesn’t, it appears, stay at CPCs. Some of the various groups and networks (some are huge) share information among each other and, as Planned Parenthood Advocates of Iowa notes:
“Because CPCs do not provide medical care, they do not have to adhere to any medical or ethical standards, including HIPAA, the national standard established to protect medical records and other personal health information. That means they are free to say whatever they want without consequence.”
There’s also a widespread concern across the pro-choice movement that as states move to criminalize or put a bounty on the backs of women who travel out-of-state to obtain abortions (Texas was the first), information gathered by CPCs may be handed off or sold to law enforcement or bounty hunters to track down women who, after visiting a CPC, leave the state to get the care they’re seeking.
Even though CPCs aren’t licensed medical facilities, they do often perform procedures like ultrasounds that in many states are unregulated. Kentucky nurse Susan Rames, an actual healthcare professional with 20 years of hospital experience and “motivated by her Christian faith,” volunteered in good faith to work at a CPC in Louisville.
As Louisville’s arts and entertainment newspaper LEO Weekly reported:
“The center was using an expired disinfectant to sanitize an essential piece of equipment for early-pregnancy ultrasounds: the transvaginal probe. And that disinfectant, medical researchers have warned in recent years, doesn’t kill the human papillomavirus, a widespread and potentially deadly sexually transmitted infection responsible for more than 90% of cervical cancers, as well as cancers of the genitals and throat.”
When Rames tried to get the clinic to upgrade to the right disinfectant her efforts were rebuffed: she even bought some of the right stuff on amazon.com and donated it to the CPC. Finally, frustrated, she filed a whistleblower complaint. But because CPCs aren’t regulated in Kentucky, her concerns were ignored by the state.
Pregnancy is the only health condition where noble lies are allowed.
If a healthcare professional — and actual nurses work in some of these CPCs — were to intentionally tell you lies about treating cancer, broken bones, hypertension, diabetes, or any other condition they could end up both on the receiving end of a major civil lawsuit, losing their license, or even in jail.
But because CPCs are largely unregulated and don’t generally offer medical services (even though they pretend to), women who are taken in or even infected with HPV have no recourse.
For the moment, the only defense women have against these noble liars is knowledge of what they are and how they work. Pass it on.
Donald Trump was not upset when the mob he sent to the U.S. Capitol chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” Two years later, Pence is set to fight a special counsel’s subpoena to come talk about Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Pence will reportedly challenge Special Counsel Jack Smith’s subpoena not on executive privilege claims—though Trump will likely try to assert executive privilege—but on the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause, which Pence will argue protects him from questioning due to his former role as president of the Senate.
Has she presented any proof that she is a U.S. citizen?
Republicans, led by Oversight Committee chair James Comer in the House, are gearing up for a multi-year investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and whether it proves he used his father’s name and status to enrich himself overseas. And yet, wrote commentator Dean Obeidallah for CNN on Monday, we already know former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner did all of this — and the evidence is getting harder and harder for even Republicans to ignore.
Obeidallah pointed to a new bombshell report by The Washington Post, detailing how Trump turbocharged the rise of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman — and he and his family, Kushner included, are reaping financial benefit.
“If Comer reads this article, he will see red flag after red flag of how Kushner and Trump potentially pocketed money from recent business deals with the Saudi government after helping Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, widely known as MBS, while in the White House,” wrote Obeidallah. “Don Fox, former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, told the Post that there was no requirement for Trump, a former commander in chief, or Kushner, a former senior White House official, to disclose financial ties to foreign governments. ‘He said their work has exposed a glaring shortfall in ethics laws that needs to be fixed by Congress,’ the paper reported.”
Trump, noted Obeidallah, was one of the most significant figures defending, and blocking efforts to sanction MBS after he ordered the murder of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, even saying, “I saved his ass.”
Then, when he left office, as he and Kushner faced “unprecedented business challenges,” both came upon Saudi money, with Kushner receiving a $2 billion infusion from the Saudis into his private equity firm and Trump getting to host LIV golf tournaments, bankrolled by the Saudi wealth fund, at his properties.
“Comer is correct that the ‘American people deserve transparency and accountability’ when it comes to anyone profiting off political connections — especially when the people officially served in our government,” concluded Obeidallah. “If Comer is sincere, we should be seeing letters demanding the same information from Kushner, Trump and daughter Ivanka as he sent to Hunter Biden. If not, then we know the congressman is doing nothing more than using our tax dollars to try to hurt the President and help the GOP.”
Of course, they struck at night because they are too cowardly to stand up and be recognized.
A township in Michigan is reeling from a 24-hour period from early Sunday morning to early Monday morning that featured two major acts of hate, although authorities do not know if the two incidents are related.
The first incident occurred early Sunday morning and involved the family of a well-known surgical veterinarian in the community, Dr. Lucretia Greear. Greear specializes in holistic treatments and treating cancer patients — and happens to be in an interracial marriage.
Lucretia’s husband Tony was alerted to the incident by his son. Video cameras show that a single individual who was joined by additional people in two other vehicles drove up to the Greear’s vehicles and used a white marker to write a racial epithet and a swastika, as well as other expletives and vulgar images.
“I was furious,” said Tony Greear in an interview with WXYZ-TV in Michigan. “My son called me and said, ‘Dad, come outside. You won’t believe this.'”
Lucretia Greear took the high road in her response to the hate, but still feels the repercussions of the violation of her home.
“It’s very scary,” she said. “It’s like not feeling safe in my home, you know, how far is this going to go?” Greear continued. “I was up all night and I don’t think it registered to me how hurtful and how hateful it was. I — just processing that there’s nothing about me that should be wrong for my children but today there is. They have a Black mom.”
Grear also took the time to directly speak to the assailants.
“I feel sorry that your heart is filled with that much hate and that much hurt,” Greear said. “You have a miserable life.”
Roughly 24 hours later, early Monday morning in Brownstown Township, police were canvassing the same neighborhood after anti-Semitic fliers were found placed in small plastic bags and thrown outside of an estimated 20 homes. The same fliers have been found across Michigan previously. The small plastic bags are weighed down with rocks and gravel so they won’t blow away in the wind.
The events of the last 24 hours were a shock to Brownstown Township Supervisor Ed Smith, another prominent African-American in the community.
“Hate does not go away, it just hides,” Smith said. “So it’s important for all of us to be proactive.”
Jim Jordan and other Republicons are “investigating” Hunter Biden’s laptop, including nude photos of him that were planted on his laptop after he dropped it off at a computer repair shop.
If we are going to investigate Hunter Biden naked, when will we investigate Melania Trump?
Who is behind those “Jesus Gets Us” ads on the Super Bowl?
Well, it’s NOT Jesus.
Instead, it’s a group of very wealthy “christian evangelicals” whose goal is to take over the US government. Believe it.
