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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 07:00
MSNBC framing of today’s hearing: Attorney General Merrick Garland appeared before the House judiciary Committee for the first time since Donald Trump and Hunter Biden’s separate indictments and it went about how you would expect it to go. House Republicans accused AG Garland of politicizing the Department of Justice to protect President Biden. Democrats accused Republicans of politicizing Judicial Oversight to benefit Donald Trump and AG Garland, well, he just tried to defend himself. Oh those crazy Republicans and Democrats. They’re all full of shit, amirite? Just playing politics. Waddaya gonna do? This is the problem, folks. It’s not “both sides.” It’s Republicans. It’s not hard to make a judgment about this. It’s called reality.
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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 05:30
Claire Potter talks about the Lauren Boebert “situation” in her newsletter today making the point that while it’s not nice to slut-shame women, it’s something that Boebert and her erstwhile buddy Marjorie Taylor Greene actually embrace as a big part of their MAGA image: … I do not feel inclined to lecture other people who slut-shame Lauren Boebert. I think it is misguided, and it isn’t because of the unproven allegations that she actually worked as an escort on a sugar-daddy website. It’s because she has spent a lot of time and energy polishing her reputation as a Gun Chick, a popular erotic figure on the right who we might tentatively define as “the slutty girl next door—with a gun.” It’s not an accident that Boebert looks and acts slutty; it’s calculated. It is something you are supposed to notice, and it is supposed to cause Republican dicks to lead the male voters they are attached to into the voting booth on election day.
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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 04:59
Speaking in New York on Tuesday during the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, Foreign Minister Penny Wong called for negotiations to begin on a treaty that would halt the production of fissile material – the basic ingredient for nuclear bombs. “We all want a world without nuclear weapons,” she said, and Continue reading »
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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 04:58
Increasingly I keep finding myself singing, even humming or whistling the old Graham Nash song, ‘Military Madness,’ sometimes hardly aware that I am doing so. ‘Military madness is killing my country Solitary sadness comes over me, War, war, war, war, war, war.’ Of course Australia has always been obsessed with war. While still ‘opening up Continue reading »
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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 04:57
According to independent observers who visited the region, Beijing has implemented policies to help Uygurs after crushing terrorist threat. We have all heard the “genocide” narrative from the mainstream news media about Xinjiang. Four independent German sinologists and an international law specialist investigated on site on their own initiative in May and returned with their Continue reading »
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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 04:55
Shadow boxing around “universal health coverage” instead of “universal access to healthcare” in the UN General Assembly reflects deeper tensions around the direction of the world economy. At the high-level meeting of the UN General Assembly on Thursday, 21 September the delegates will consider a compromise document on universal health coverage (the 1 September draft Continue reading »
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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 04:54
The Australian public needs to know why persecution of the principled, courageous ATO whistle blower Richard Boyle has dragged on for six years. He blew the whistle on the ATO in October 2017, the AFP raided his home in April 2018, in March 2023 a judge in South Australia decided he was not immune from Continue reading »
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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 04:52
Australians have been able to witness the voter remorse that can arise when a nation votes on a specific question of policy in a referendum that has the potential to set their country on a new course. Referendum questions with that level of significance don’t come along very often for democratic nations but when they Continue reading »
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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 04:51
We believe the right and best course of action would be for the United States’ Department of Justice to cease its pursuit and prosecution of Julian Assange.” As a cross-party delegation of Australian politicians headed to Washington, D.C. on Tuesday to pressure the U.S. government to end its yearslong pursuit of jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Continue reading »
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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 04:48

We're back from summer vacation!!!  Join us TOMORROW, Thursday, September 21 at 1pm ET / 10am PT, as we resume our normally scheduled call to chat about all things Drupal and nonprofits. (Convert to your local time zone.)

No pre-defined topics on the agenda this month, so join us for an informal chat about anything at the intersection of Drupal and nonprofits.  Got something specific on your mind? Feel free to share ahead of time in our collaborative Google doc: https://nten.org/drupal/notes!

All nonprofit Drupal devs and users, regardless of experience level, are always welcome on this call.

This free call is sponsored by NTEN.org and open to everyone. 

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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 04:00
The questioning of Merrick Garland before the House Judiciary Committee is enough to make you give up on democracy if this is what we have as leaders BIGGS: Is it consistent with DOJ policy to give people a heads up so they can move boxes of information? GARLAND: You’re asking me to comment on a particular case BIGGS: Forget Delaware and what they did GARLAND: I’m sorry, I thought you were asking about Mar-a-Lago pic.twitter.com/WUmgxVQo6O — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 20, 2023 Jim Jordan’s latest galaxy-brain conspiracy theory is that Biden decided to let a Trump-appointed US attorney stay on as part of a plot to protect Hunter Biden pic.twitter.com/yco8QkqR9l — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 20, 2023 Huh? This makes no sense. Massie asked how many. How does indicting Epps give the answer to how many? My gawd this is so stupid. https://t.co/Dkt0Ao4nVa — Armando (@ArmandoNDK) September 20, 2023
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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 02:30
Speaker McCarthy: “It’s hard to pass anything in this place. We started out in a five-seat majority. I got one member who’s now resigned, we’ve got a couple of members who are out as well. Anything we do is pretty tough” pic.twitter.com/bYkJcjsjvc — Haley Talbot (@haleytalbotcnn) September 18, 2023 It seems like only yesterday that we were on the cusp of defaulting on the debt and many of us were predicting that the kamikaze Freedom Caucus was going to make it happen. They sure sounded serious. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was unable to keep that extremist right flank under control and they were threatening to unseat him under the rule they insisted he adopt in order to get the votes he needed to attain office if he didn’t meet their demands. With a four vote margin he had almost no room to maneuver. After the interminable 15 rounds of voting and all the backroom deals he had to make to get the gavel back in January the prospects for a deal looked very slim.
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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 00:30
More strange bedfellows MSNBC’s “Deadline White House” on Tuesday featured a long segment with members of Operation Saving Democracy. Led by Lt. Col. Amy McGrath (USMC, ret.), the group boasts “almost 600 retired Generals, Admirals, Ambassadors, cabinet and service secretaries, appointed leaders, elected officials, and Senior Executive Service leaders have come together at this time of significant threat to the essential tenets of our Democratic institutions and values.” Joining McGrath were Adm. Steve Abbot (USN, ret.) and Rear Adm. Michael Smith (USN, ret.) The group believes “The extreme far-right authoritarian ideology that has taken hold in the GOP is an attack on democracy itself.” They hope their credentials and numbers will make an impression on the Trump cult, or else help mobilize ordinary Americans against the domestic terror threat Trumpism poses. “Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy,” Abbot states into the camera. “Donald Trump” is a collective noun here, shorthand for a deeper problem.
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Wed, 20/09/2023 - 23:00
Stay on message “How they do it,” Digby’s post and comments on “Tough Love For the Democrats” from Rick Wilson’s substack, blew up my Mastodon feed last night. Quite a fewf people agree it’s time for Democrats to stop farting around and treat the fight with MAGA as what it is: a fight. Wilson shares the GOP’s two rules: Rule 1: Just win, baby. Rule 2: Stay on message. Chuck your “almost religious belief that policy wins elections,” Wilson advises. Quit trying to win on fact-checking. This is a bare-knuckles brawl. Wilson credits Joe Biden for declaring MAGA Republicans a threat in 2022, that what was at stake is democracy and liberty. It still is. Next year’s elections are about “whether the American government is a tool for opportunity or one of oppression.” “Get on and stay on this message, Democrats,” Wilson insists. Biden has gotten results. The former Republican consultant names Biden “arguably the most successful Democratic President since FDR, taken in total.” A friend with Clinton White House experience concurs.