Something to savor with your morning coffee:
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He never stops being embarrassing: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) kicked off the first meeting of the House Judiciary Committee last week by cordially inviting an accused murderer to lead the Pledge of Allegiance. Under its new Republican leadership, the 118th Congress’ judiciary committee may choose to start each hearing with the pledge ― an amendment to the rules put forth by Gaetz, who said it allowed members to invite “inspirational constituents” to lead it. The first honor went to Corey Beekman, a retired National Guard member accused of killing a man in 2019 whose case has not gone to trial. Gaetz did not mention this aspect of his guest’s backstory. Beekman led the pledge in his military dress uniform on Feb. 1. “It is my pleasure and distinct honor to introduce to the committee Staff Sgt. Corey Ryan Beekman, an American hero and a constituent of mine residing in Pensacola, Florida,” Gaetz said in the video still available on C-SPAN. He rolled through Beekman’s life story.
What’s a little more suffering? This is depressing. But it’s best that people over 60 understand that it’s every man for himself, accept the fact that their lives are considered expendable and assess the risks accordingly: In early December, Aldo Caretti developed a cough and, despite all his precautions, came up positive for Covid on a home test. It took his family a couple of days to persuade Mr. Caretti, never fond of doctors, to go to the emergency room. There, he was sent directly to the intensive care unit. Mr. Caretti and his wife, Consiglia, both 85, lived quietly in a condo in Plano, Texas. “He liked to read and learn, in English and Italian,” said his son Vic Caretti, 49. “He absolutely adored his three grandchildren.” Aldo Caretti had encountered some health setbacks last year, including a mild stroke and a serious bout of shingles, but “he recuperated from all that.” Covid was different. Even on a ventilator, Mr. Caretti struggled to breathe. After 10 days, “he wasn’t getting better,” said Vic Caretti, who flew in from Salt Lake City. “His organs were starting to break down.
Even worse than we expected In case you missed the fireworks, here’s Dana Milbank on the “weaponization” committee: One thing is clear after Thursday’s first hearing of the new “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government”: The weaponization panel’s weapon of choice will be the blunderbuss. I don’t want to be conspiratorial about it, but House Republicans somehow turned Room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the Judiciary Committee hearing room, into the main ballroom of a QAnon convention. The witnesses — including world-class conspiracy purveyors Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Ivermectin) and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (I-Ukraine bioweapons labs) — might as well have been auditioning to guest-host “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” It is possible that, by random chance, one of the witnesses may have said something that is factually true, but any pellet of accuracy was lost amid all the errant slugs that ricocheted crazily out of their muzzles. They revisited the “Russian collusion hoax” perpetrated by the “fake dossier,” Fusion GPS, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
TST rejeita acordo e diz que empresa fornece serviços de transporte, não tecnologia. Uber fala em decisão 'ideológica'.
The post Decisão reconhece direitos trabalhistas de motorista da Uber e acusa a empresa de manipular jurisprudência a seu favor appeared first on The Intercept.
One of the issues with seditious conspiracy charges against Trump is the matter of intent. Did he know that he had lost the election and went ahead with his plot anyway? Of course he did. And here is some external proof we haven’t seen before: Former president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral fraud claims but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter. The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined werevoter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court. About a dozen people at the firmworked on the report, including econometricians, who use statistics to model and predict outcomes, the people said.
Solidarity is power Many isms attempt to capture the divide between left and right both in the U.S. and abroad. A broad set of impulses fuel the personal, religious, cultural, class, and political clashes roiling society. Without naming it, Heather Cox Richardson examines the shortsightedness in the current appetite in some quarters for fascism: Over all the torrent of news these days is a fundamental struggle about the nature of human government. Is democracy still a viable form of government, or is it better for a country to have a strongman in charge? Democracy stands on the principle of equality for all people, and those who are turning away from democracy, including the right wing in the United States, object to that equality. They worry that equal rights for women and minorities—especially LGBTQ people—will undermine traditional religion and traditional power structures. They believe democracy saps the morals of a country and are eager for a strong leader who will use the power of the government to reinforce their worldview. But empowering a strongman ends oversight and enables those in power to think of themselves as above the law.
Democrats’ new direction? “There has to be a dream. We have to stand for a thing,” messaging consultant Anat Shenker Osorio tells students. That seems to have filtered up to top Democrats more accustomed to “being too reactive and too defensive when confronting Republican attacks,” writes Christian Paz at Vox. If President Joe Biden is, as he appears, already campaigning for a second term, it “is likely to be less oppositional and more optimistic, with less focus on highlighting how bad the other side is, and more attention on imagining how much more Democrats can accomplish with four more years in power,” Paz writes (although the White House declined comment). Negativity is out of fashion: That’s not necessarily how Democrats have run their campaigns in the Trump era and even into Biden’s presidency. Since the 2016 election, much of Democrats’ political strategy has been to run vocally and clearly anti-Trump, anti-MAGA Republican campaigns.
I’m a boomer and the Gen Zs are grandchild age so I suppose it’s natural that I relate to them. That whole “skip a generation” thing is often true. Certainly, when it comes to politics it seems to me that the Democratic new guard is much savvier than both their immediate predecessors and the old guard my age. They see the opposition for what it is in a way that many liberals my age took forever to recognize (and that’s assuming they ever have.) I’m not sure why I could see the truth when so many couldn’t but I’m super relieved to see the younger generation in electoral politics is moving beyond some of the more parochial types of infighting that has so often characterized the Democratic party to form a popular front against the fascist tide on the right. Maybe we’ll get through this after all. Note that I’m speaking specifically of elected politicians. The campus wars are something else and I would guess it’s at least partially attributable to the fact that these young people are not exposed to the right while the elected politicians are.
Or sanctimonious right wing NY Times op-ed writers either This, from Eric Levitz in NY Magazine, is right on about Ron DeSantis: Ron DeSantis is the popular governor of a racially diverse state with a substantial Democratic population. He is also a reactionary. In the New York Times, Pamela Paul argues that liberals have a lot to learn from these two facts. The columnist implores her fellow Democrats to avoid writing DeSantis off as “another unelectable right-wing lunatic unfit for national office.” Rather than dismissing the Florida governor and his supporters as “racist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic,” Paul advises liberals to reflect on his political strengths. She explains that, unlike Donald Trump, DeSantis was a star student at an Ivy League school. It’s therefore likely that he “knows what he’s doing” when he scandalizes progressives. He is a savvy political actor, if his approval rating is any guide. Democrats should therefore seek to learn from his example. It isn’t clear precisely what Paul believes we should learn.