The Evening Blues - 7-13-21



eb1pt12


The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Willie Love

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features delta blues piano player Willie Love. Enjoy!

Willie Love - Everybody's Fishing

"The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it."

-- Hunter S. Thompson


News and Opinion

Worth a full read:

Hedges: Bless the Traitors

Daniel Hale, an active-duty Air Force intelligence analyst, stood in the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park in October 2011 in his military uniform. He held up a sign that read “Free Bradley Manning,” who had not yet announced her transition. It was a singular act of conscience few in uniform had the strength to replicate. ... At the time, Hale was stationed at Fort Bragg. A few months later he deployed to Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Force Base. He would later learn that that while he was in Zuccotti Park, Barack Obama ordered a drone strike some 12,000 miles away in Yemen that killed Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of the radical cleric and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been killed by a drone strike two weeks earlier. The Obama administration claimed it was targeting the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Ibrahim al-Banna, who it believed, incorrectly, was with the boy and his cousins, all of whom were also killed in the attack. That massacre of innocents became public, but there were thousands more such attacks that wantonly killed noncombatants that only Hale and those with top-security clearances knew about.

Starting in 2013, Hale, while working as a private contractor, leaked some 17 classified documents about the drone program to investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, although the reporter is not named in court documents. The leaked documents, The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”

Hale was coerced by Biden’s Justice Department on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. He is being held in the Alexandria Adult Detention Center in Virginia, awaiting sentencing on July 27. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison. He now faces up to a decade in prison. ...

Because Hale was charged under the Espionage Act, he, like other whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of suspects held in black sites, was not permitted to explain his motivations and intent to the court. Nor could he provide evidence to the court that the drone assassination program killed and wounded large numbers of noncombatants, including children. He faced trial in the Eastern District of Virginia, much of whose population has links to the military or intelligence community, and whose courts have become notorious for their harsh sentences on behalf of the government. ...

In 2019, the Trump administration indicted Hale on four counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of theft of government property. The thousands of targeted assassinations carried out by drones, often in countries that are not at war with the United States, are an egregious violation of international law. They are turning huge swathes of the planet against us. The secret kill lists, which include US citizens, have transformed the executive branch into judge, jury and executioner, obliterating the right to due process. Those that commit these killings are unaccountable. Hale sacrificed his career and his freedom to warn us. He is not a danger to the country. The danger we face comes from the secret drone program, which is spiraling out of control and ominously being adopted by domestic law enforcement agencies. If left unchecked, the terror we impose on others we will soon impose on ourselves.

UN Expert Says Illegal Israeli Settlements Amount to War Crimes

Canadian academic and the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, Michael Lynk, made waves on Friday.

Lynk asked the nations of the world to classify the Israeli government practice of sponsoring Israeli squatters on Palestinian-owned land on the Occupied Palestinian West Bank as a "a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court."

The Special Rapporteur explained, "For Israel, the settlements serve two related purposes. One is to guarantee that the occupied territory will remain under Israeli control in perpetuity. The second purpose is to ensure that there will never be a genuine Palestinian state. These are exactly the reasons why the international community agreed to prohibit the practice of settler implantation when it created the Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949 and the Rome Statute in 1998."

He called the Israeli squatters "the engine of Israel's 54-year-old occupation, the longest in the modern world".

The UN High Commission on Human Rights notes that "There are now close to 300 settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, with more than 680,000 Israeli settlers."

Lynk pointed out that the illegality of the Israeli squatter-settlements is the most settled issue in international law. The UNHCR concurs that "Their illegality has been confirmed by the United Nations Security Council, the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, the International Court of Justice, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention," among many other local and international governing bodies. Actually, you could just have listed the UN Security Council, since its decisions have the force of law internationally. The UNSC has branded Israeli squatter-settlements illegal in a host of resolutions.

He added, "It is a tragic paradox that, while the Israeli settlements are clearly prohibited by international law, the international community has been remarkably reluctant to enforce its own laws.

DEA, FBI Informants LINKED TO Haiti Assassination?!?!

Haiti police say murder suspect is middleman living in Florida

Police in Haiti say they have arrested a new suspect in the assassination of the country’s president, Jovenel Moïse – a Haitian living in Florida who arrived on a private plane in June allegedly to act as a middleman between the alleged hitmen and the plot’s unnamed masterminds. ... The latest suspect was identified by police as Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haitian in his 60s living in Florida who describes himself as a doctor and has accused his homeland’s leaders of corruption.

“He arrived by private plane in June with political objectives and contacted a private security firm to recruit the people who committed this act,” Haiti’s police chief, Léon Charles, said, describing a private Venezuelan security company based in Florida called CTU. The wife of at least one Colombian arrested for his part in the attack, Francisco Uribe, has claimed CTU offered her husband around $2,700 (£1,950) a month to work in Haiti. According to newly disclosed details, CTU also bought the tickets to Haiti for a number of Colombians implicated in the plot.

The head of Haiti’s police, Léon Charles, accused Sanon of working with those who plotted and participated in Moïse’s killing, which plunged the nation of more than 11 million people into uncertainty. It remained unclear, however, whether Sanon was the alleged key mover – although some news sources suggested he had ambitions to be president – or how a former bankrupt in Florida had either financed the plot or planned to seize power. ...

The police chief said that among the items found by officers at Sanon’s house in Haiti were a hat with the logo of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Moïse’s killers had claimed to be DEA agents when they assaulted his home. Also reported found were 20 boxes of bullets, gun parts, four vehicle licence plates from the Dominican Republic, two cars and correspondence with unidentified people.

Laurent Dubois, a Haiti expert and Duke University professor, said questions over Moïse’s assassination could remain unanswered for a long time. “There are so many potential players who could be behind it,” he said. “There is going to be some jockeying for positions of power. That is one big worry.”

Krystal Ball: Media, GOP Elites DEMAND Regime Change In Cuba

Merkel Is Sent Letter on Assange Before Her Visit to Biden

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is headed to Washington on Thursday for a meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden and a group of 120 Bundestag members, German journalists, writers and artists have sent her a letter telling her to ask Biden to “save face” and release imprisoned journalist Julian Assange on humanitarian grounds.

“We sincerely ask you to help build bridges in the Julian Assange case,” says the letter, dated July 11, according to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa). Merkel was told “how important it is in the interests of defending freedom of the press to drop the lawsuit against the Wikileaks founder so that he can recover freely with his family.”

Merkel was urged to find “a humanitarian solution for Assange and a face-saving solution for the U.S. President,” the letter said. “It would be a strong, lasting humanitarian gesture at the end of your term of office and for President Joe Biden, finally, an opportunity to leave the Donald Trump era behind completely in the interests of protecting freedom of the press and freedom of expression.”

Matt Stoller: Is Biden's FULL COURT PRESS On Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big AG Too Good To Be True?

What happens at Sun Valley, the secret gathering of unelected billionaire kings?

The Sun Valley conference is primarily known as a place where tech and media moguls gather to do a little fly fishing and strike multibillion-dollar merger deals, while various members of the financial press flit about the periphery of the resort like a bunch of tabloid hacks desperate for a snapshot of Mark Zuckerberg in the season’s latest fleece vest. More fundamentally, the conference is, like Davos, a mechanism for the concentration of wealth, dressed up as something friendlier. Here, America’s wealthiest mega-billionaires gather with the chief executive of America’s most powerful companies, the director of the CIA, and America’s most worthless pseudo-journalists (hello, Anderson Cooper) to develop the social and business connections that allow the top 0.00001% of earners to continue to accumulate a share of our nation’s wealth that already exceeds the famously cartoonish inequality of the Gilded Age of Rockefeller and Carnegie. Everything that happens at Sun Valley will contribute to the ability of attendees like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mike Bloomberg to increase their society-warping fortunes. They and their fellow billionaires got more than 50% richer during the pandemic year, by doing absolutely nothing but sitting back and watching their capital grow as millions around the world suffered and died. Their power over the course of this country grows ever more unassailable and unaccountable to anything other than their own whims. We are developing a private class of billionaire kings whose will is omnipotent and untouchable by any democratic force. This is the state of affairs that the Sun Valley conference serves to intensify. It is, by any reasonable measure, a threat to the long term stability of our country that far exceeds anything the Taliban could ever dream up.

Yet there is a noticeable lack of Special Forces troops rappelling into the scenic Idaho woods to capture Oprah Winfrey and Tim Cook as they go whitewater rafting. The collective wealth of the small group of people inside that Sun Valley resort is estimated to be a trillion dollars – meaning that confiscating it all could end homelessness in America for the next decade, with a few hundred billion left over. Instead of pursuing this obviously good idea, we opt instead to leave all of that wealth in the hands of the rich, so that Sun Valley attendees Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson can use it to race one another to become the biggest asshole ever to go to space. ...

It is odd that a nation obsessed with identifying threats has developed such a blind spot to the existential threat posed by the rich getting infinitely richer. Americans stockpile guns to fight off imaginary home invaders, flee to gated exurbs to hide from imaginary street crime, and launch doomed forever wars to battle imaginary foreign terrorists. But 40 years of wage stagnation, rising inequality, and the nightmarish gig-ification of all aspects of economic life are not enough to prompt us to cast a wary glance at an annual confab of all the people responsible for creating the conditions that have made it impossible to work one job and retire with dignity. The people who have, in fact, sucked up all of the money that no longer belongs to the mythical American middle class cavort openly in Sun Valley while we fearmonger about antifa breaking the windows of some coffee shop. It is enough to make me think that we are not so skilled at threat assessment, after all.

There is always next year.



the horse race



Suppression Session: Texas Democrats Flee to D.C. to Block State Republican Voting Restriction Bill

Texas Democrats flee the state to thwart voting restrictions law

Texas Democrats fled the state as part of an all-out effort to block Republicans from passing new restrictions on voting in the state. The move, first reported by NBC News, escalates one of the most high-stakes battles over efforts to make it harder to vote in America.

Lawmakers took off from a private airport terminal Monday afternoon, the Texas Tribune reported, and were expected to land in Washington DC early in the evening.

It comes days into a special legislative session in Texas in which Republicans are advancing measures that would impose new identification requirements on mail-in ballots, ban 24-hour and drive-thru voting, and empower partisan poll watchers.

Texas, a state Trump handily won in 2020, is already one of the hardest places to vote in the US. It is among a handful of states that do not have online voter registration nor does it allow everyone to vote by mail, only allowing those who are 65, have a disability, or who meet other criteria to do so. Texas was among the states with the lowest turnout in 2020. ...

With no quorum, Republicans in the state legislature will be unable to proceed with any business in the special session, which can last a maximum of 30 days. Democrats who flee the state face potential arrest, according to NBC News as state Republicans can authorize law enforcement to haul the Democratic legislators back to the state. Republicans did just that in 2003, when Democratic lawmakers fled the state in an effort to block new electoral maps that would favor Republicans.

Super PAC Backing Nina Turner Challenger Launches UNFOUNDED Smear Campaign, FAILS



the evening greens


Oh my gosh, not Saint Barack!?!

'This Is a Scandal': Documents Reveal Obama's EPA Approved Toxic Chemicals for Fracking in 2011

Between 2012 and 2020, fossil fuel corporations injected potentially carcinogenic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or chemicals that can degrade into PFAS, into the ground while fracking for oil and gas, after former President Barack Obama's Environmental Protection Agency approved their use despite agency scientists' concerns about toxicity.

The EPA's approval in 2011 of three new compounds for use in oil and gas drilling or fracking that can eventually break down into PFAS, also called "forever chemicals," was not publicized until Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) obtained internal records from the agency through a Freedom of Information Act request, the New York Times reported Monday after reviewing the files.

According to PSR's new report, Fracking with "Forever Chemicals," oil and gas companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others engaged in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have since 2012 pumped toxic chemicals that can form PFAS into more than 1,200 wells in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming.

While the Times noted that the newly released documents constitute some of the earliest evidence of the possible presence of PFAS in fracking fluids, PSR's report warns that "the lack of full disclosure of chemicals used in oil and gas operations raises the potential that PFAS could have been used even more extensively than records indicate, both geographically and in other stages of the oil and gas extraction process, such as drilling, that precede the underground injections known as fracking."

"It's very disturbing to see the extent to which critical information about these chemicals is shielded from public view," Barbara Gottlieb, PSR's Environment & Health Program director, said Monday in a press release. "The lack of transparency about fracking chemicals puts human health at risk."

As the Times reported:

In a consent order issued for the three chemicals on Oct. 26, 2011, EPA scientists pointed to preliminary evidence that, under some conditions, the chemicals could "degrade in the environment" into substances akin to PFOA, a kind of PFAS chemical, and could "persist in the environment" and "be toxic to people, wild mammals, and birds." The EPA scientists recommended additional testing. Those tests were not mandatory and there is no indication that they were carried out.

"The EPA identified serious health risks associated with chemicals proposed for use in oil and gas extraction, and yet allowed those chemicals to be used commercially with very lax regulation," Dusty Horwitt, a researcher at PSR, told the newspaper.

In a statement released Monday, Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, called the PSR report "alarming," and said it "confirms what hundreds of scientific studies and thousands of pages of data have already shown over the last decade: fracking is inherently hazardous to the health and safety of people and communities in proximity to it, and it should be banned entirely."

As PSR notes, PFAS—highly potent toxins that accumulate in the body and persist in the environment—pose a threat to human and environmental well-being. Negative health effects linked to PFAS include low infant birth weights, disruptions of the immune and reproductive systems, and cancer.

"The potential that these chemicals are being used in oil and gas operations should prompt regulators to take swift action to investigate the extent of this use, pathways of exposure, and whether people are being harmed," said Linda Birnbaum, board-certified Ph.D. toxicologist and former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Hauter added that "this says nothing of the dreadful impact fossil fuel extraction and burning is having on our runaway climate crisis. Fracking threatens every person on the planet, directly or indirectly."

According to the Times:

In a 2016 report, the EPA identified more than 1,600 chemicals used in drilling and fracking, or found in fracking wastewater, including close to 200 that were deemed carcinogens or toxic to human health. The same EPA report warned that fracking fluid could escape from drill sites into the groundwater and that leaks could spring from underground wells that store millions of gallons of wastewater.

Communities near drilling sites have long complained of contaminated water and health problems that they say are related. The lack of disclosure on what sort of chemicals are present has hindered diagnoses or treatment. Various peer-reviewed studies have found evidence of illnesses and other health effects among people living near oil and gas sites, a disproportionate burden of which fall on people of color and other underserved or marginalized communities.

"The Obama-Biden administration approved the use of toxic PFAS chemicals for fracking a decade ago," said Hauter, "and all these years later, President Joe Biden's practices haven't seemed to change a bit."

"The Biden administration has claimed to be concerned about PFAS contamination throughout the country," Hauter said. "Biden himself pledged during the campaign to halt new fracking on federal lands. Meanwhile, this administration is approving new fracking permits at a pace similar to Trump, with no letup in sight."

Earlier this month, whistleblowers at the EPA accused the Biden administration of continuing the "war on science," with managers at the agency allegedly modifying reports about the risks posed by chemicals and retaliating against employees who report the misconduct.

David Sirota REVEALS Susan Rice's BLATANT Corruption While Workers Get Fleeced

Biden Boosted A Pipeline, Now His Aide Could Reap A Windfall

Federal ethics regulators have ordered Joe Biden’s top domestic policy adviser Susan Rice to divest her multimillion-dollar holdings in a fossil fuel giant weeks after the Biden administration boosted the company’s controversial pipeline, according to government documents obtained by The Daily Poster. The pipeline decision — backing a Trump administration policy over the objections of environmental groups — came as the company’s stock price has skyrocketed. That has created a potential financial jackpot for Rice, who as Domestic Policy Council chief will now be able to delay capital gains taxes on any windfall made off her sale of thousands of shares of Enbridge.

In all, Rice has been instructed by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to divest stock worth nearly $32 million from more than three dozen companies and one index fund that she and her family own. Among the holdings are approximately $2.7 million worth of shares of Enbridge, the Canadian oil and gas pipeline company constructing the controversial Line 3 pipeline through Indigenous lands in Minnesota.

While the Biden administration recently revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline project, Biden Justice Department officials last month backed the permit for the Line 3 pipeline in court, allowing the tar sands oil pipeline project to move forward amid the intensifying climate crisis. Enbridge shares are currently up about 13 percent since Biden took office, and earlier disclosures show Rice has previously raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars of dividend payments from the company.

Record number of manatees die in Florida as food source dries up

More manatees have died already this year than in any other year in Florida’s recorded history, primarily from starvation due to the loss of seagrass beds, state officials have said. The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission reported that 841 manatee deaths were recorded between 1 January and 2 July, breaking the previous record of 830 that died during the whole of 2013 because of an outbreak of toxic red tide.

More than half the deaths occurred in the Indian River Lagoon and its surrounding areas in Volusia, Brevard, Indian River, St Lucie and Martin counties, according to regional news outlet TCPalm. The overwhelming majority of deaths have been in Brevard, where 312 manatees have died.

Some biologists believe water pollution is killing the seagrass beds in the area.

Wildfires blaze across western states as heatwave shatters records

Firefighters are working in extreme heat to contain a number of wildfires raging across the US west, with the largest burning in California and Oregon, as another heatwave bakes the region and puts strain on power grids.

The Beckwourth Complex, which is the largest wildfire of the year in California, was raging along the Nevada state line and has burned about 140 square miles (362 sq km) as of Monday. State regulators have asked consumers to voluntarily “conserve as much electricity as possible” to avoid any outages starting in the afternoon.

In Oregon, the Bootleg Fire exploded to 240 square miles as it raced through heavy timber in the Fremont-Winema national forest, near the Klamath county town of Sprague River. The fire has put pressure on the power grid of neighbouring California, disrupting service on three transmission lines providing up to 5,500 megawatts of electricity to the state. Hundreds of residents in the Klamath Falls area are under mandatory evacuation orders. “The Bootleg fire will see the potential for extreme growth today,” said the National Weather Service in Medford, Oregon.

And in south-east Washington state, a wildfire has grown to almost 60 square miles while in Idaho, Governor Brad Little has mobilized the national guard to help fight fires sparked after lightning storms swept across the drought-stricken region.


Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

America's Afghan War Is Over, so What About Iraq—and Iran?

Author of the Mega-Viral Thread on MAGA Voters, Darryl Cooper, Explains His Thinking

How Western Media Came to Mirror That of Gulf Despots

U.S. Launches Another Attempt To Regime Change Cuba

Activism Uncensored: Colombia in Chaos

Cuba, Space Billionaires, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Banks Are Reversing Course on PPP Loans to Small Business Owners

Kentucky Retirement System Litigation Against KKR, Blackstone, PAAMCO et. al. Takes New Class Action/Civil RICO Twist

'Which Side Are You On?': Poor People's Campaign Pressures US Senate on Democracy and Justice

The push to clear homeless camps from Venice Beach: ‘I don’t know where we’ll go’

Progressive Backlash to 'Billionaire Blastoff' Highlights Inequality on Earth

‘The revolution could not be televised’: why were so many black concert films erased from history?

Democracy Now - Controlling Women: With Roe v. Wade at Risk, Authors Say Move Past Court to Save Reproductive Rights

Krystal and Saagar: Oligarch Space Race REVEALS Danger Of Privatizing Public Goods

Krystal and Saagar: Biden, DNC Want TO CENSOR Text Messages For 'Misinformation'

Krystal and Saagar: Will Monthly Payments To Parents Change Politics Forever?

Jimmy Dore: MSNBC Courts Younger Viewers With NeoCons & FBI Agents

Rising: Dr. Cornel West RESIGNS From Harvard University, Reflects Utter FAILURE Of U.S. Academia


A Little Night Music

Willie Love - Take It Easy Baby

Willie Love - Worried Blues

Willie Love - Lonesome World Blues

Willie Love - Little Car Blues

Sonny Boy Williamson & Willie Love - I'm Not Beggin' Nobody

Willie Love & Sonny Boy Williamson - Pontiac Blues

Willie Love And His Three Aces - Feed My Body To The Fishes

Willie Love - Vanity Dresser Boogie

Willie Love - Shout, Brother, Shout


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16 users have voted.

Comments

mimi's picture

I hope Merkel brings above mentioned letter to Biden and soils his face with it like the good fellows do in the movies. Smashing the creamy cakes in the face of those they think deserve their faces being smashed. I remember the days when Biden and Besoz were good buddies and I remember Obama learning about banking from his granny. It is always good to watch out what kids learn from their parents and how they grew up.

May be one day I come back and read the rest. For now I should not read more.

Stay cool, dry and well fed. And thank you for all you do. Kudos. It feels like a tour de force you put yourself through every night. Even if I don't sound like it, but I admire your strength.

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8 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

@mimi

heh, i hope that merkel will talk some sense into biden, but of course i'm not going to hold my breath. biden doesn't seem like the sort that is permeable by mere common sense.

have a great evening!

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5 users have voted.
mimi's picture

@joe shikspack
underestimated for her silent sarcastic wit and so nothing will happen, she won't talk sense into him, he won't convince with gentle blah, blah.

nothing will change or happen.

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3 users have voted.

those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power.
Does that make the citizens of the US a hostile power?
And why is the security state so afraid of truth?

Purity of purpose is not the reason to withhold information.
We would just like to know what is being perpetrated
in our name. Kinda makes the ptb uncomfortable.

Thanks for the EB Joe.

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12 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

@QMS

Does that make the citizens of the US a hostile power?

i guess so. after all, the countries we are expressing our undying love to with hellfire missiles certainly are aware of what the u.s. government is doing. the citizens of the u.s. are the ones being kept out of the loop by classification.

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9 users have voted.

The state has gotten off of the rails.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/13/texas-governor-arrest-de...

Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has vowed to arrest Democrat lawmakers who have fled the state in an attempt to stop an overhaul of election laws that they say damages the right to vote, especially for communities of color.

Private planes carrying more than 50 Democrats left Austin for Washington DC on Monday, skipping town just days before the Texas house of representatives was expected to give early approval to sweeping new voting restrictions in a special legislative session.

The move denied the Republican-led legislature a quorum, leaving it with too few lawmakers in attendance to conduct business. That means it could not, at least for now, vote on the bill.

Even though Democrats cannot stop the Republican legislation, bringing the legislature to a halt might give them some kind of leverage in negotiating over the bills, as the Guardian previously reported. Walking out also signals to constituents how far Democrats are willing to go to try to stop Republican efforts to make it harder to vote.

In response Abbott told an Austin television station he would simply keep calling special sessions of the legislature through next year if necessary, and raised the possibility of Democrats facing arrest upon returning home.

“As soon as they come back in the state of Texas, they will be arrested, they will be cabined inside the Texas capitol until they get their job done,” Abbott said.

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8 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

@humphrey

yep, that texas is a pretty amusing place. the people that live there seem to like it, though. i guess they could leave like the democrat legislators if they didn't.

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5 users have voted.

Biden keeps kissing Manchin's butt.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2021/03/26/biden-nominates-w...

Mar 26, 2021,10:48am EDT|

Biden Nominates Wife Of Powerful Sen. Joe Manchin To ‘Key’ Post

President Joe Biden on Friday nominated Gayle Conelly Manchin, wife of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), as a “key member” of the Appalachian Regional Commission, the White House announced Friday.

Tucked at the bottom of a statement also announcing nominees to the Department of Labor, U.S. Marshal Service, Office of Management and Budget and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Manchin’s nomination is for federal co-chair of the commission.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/562742-biden-chooses-former-...

07/13/21 12:51 PM EDT

President Biden plans to nominate Rahul Gupta, a former West Virginia health official, to serve as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, a White House official confirmed.

Gupta served as the commissioner for the West Virginia Bureau for Public Health under two governors from 2015 to 2018 and is an ally of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). In that role, Gupta led the state's opioid crisis response efforts and spearheaded other public health initiatives, like the neonatal abstinence syndrome birth score program meant to identify children at high risk for infant mortality.

I don't really think that he wants to get anything done.

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9 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

@humphrey

perhaps president manchin reminds biden of his old pal strom thurmond.

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10 users have voted.

@humphrey It's all part of the game. Manchin gets to feel important. The Dems get their scapegoat. Nothing fundamentally changes. If one didn't know any better, they could think he was being rewarded for preventing Biden from doing anything he promised to do. As always, watch what they do, ignore what they say.

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5 users have voted.

Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.

snoopydawg's picture

Lots and lots of people are pushing for Biden to send troops into Cuba. Jake Tapper interviewed some dude who said that Cuban police are killing people and over 100 have been disappeared. Someone said that DeSatan should send in the national guard to restore freedoms there. Someone else posted the legislation he had signed against people protesting in Florida. Cops are clearing a homeless camp close to coors field to get the undesirables out of sight. They pushed an elderly person twice on video. But yeah it’s Cuba that needs help. Gawd when will someone suggest regime change here? Bueller?

It rained for 10 minutes this morning and just enough to get the car dirty. I just washed it. S Utah is under flash flood warnings again. The one last week wiped out a lot of Zion national park structures. Big, big mess. Cloud cover is keeping nighttime temps higher than usual. Or smoke cover. Boy something stunk last night during my walk. Some type of chemical from somewhere. Both Sam and I stuck our noses up to smell it. P-U.

ETA

There are lots of areas getting monsoon rain from Nevada on through Utah. It’s nice, but not all at once. Might help some of the fires though unless it’s just wind.

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9 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Pricknick's picture

@snoopydawg

“The fish are between 1-3 inches long, so they flutter down slowly to the water,” they said.

That's some true slow fluttering.
There are a thousand different ways to release young fish.
That has to be the worst. Do they promote their success rate?
I call bullshit.

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10 users have voted.

Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

joe shikspack's picture

@snoopydawg

yeah, there are a lot of idiots that have been waiting for generations to have some sort of thin excuse to invade cuba with gun thugs. thank goodness that nobody has been that stupid so far and have managed to pacify the idiots by trying to starve the cubans.

i hope that you get some fire-quelling rain in comfortable distributions as the days go forward, which i hope will also cool you guys off, too.

have a good one!

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6 users have voted.
dystopian's picture

Hi Joe, and all,

Great tunes, when you have Elmore and Sonny Boy in your band... high caliber sheet.

Lost another great one...
https://variety.com/2021/music/news/byron-berline-dead-fiddler-bluegrass...

I once got name-checked on air at either KLOS or KMET the two big rock stations in LA, for being the first caller to name who played fiddle on Country Honk. LOL

Yeah, Saint Obama. When they find some new unknown chemical concoction of an element in the water as a result of this it should be named Obamatite to properly honor his failure. Maybe we could have a contest to name it?

Hope all are well!

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9 users have voted.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein

@dystopian
Shit!

RIP and thanks for all the tunes of my youth.

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8 users have voted.
dystopian's picture

@JtC thanks for the great tune! Awesome sauce! Imma have a day of Byron tomorrow...

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4 users have voted.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein

joe shikspack's picture

@dystopian

sad news about berline, thanks for the heads-up.

heh, obamafrackalite?

have a great evening!

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4 users have voted.
dystopian's picture

@joe shikspack OK, I think I got it, Barakbullshite! A new element composed of various PFAS chemicals approved by his administration. It's atomic weight is zero, but it will kill you. We are sooo F'd. Wink

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5 users have voted.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein

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5 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

@gjohnsit

pretty impressive.

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3 users have voted.
enhydra lutris's picture

DEA, FBI Informants LINKED TO Haiti Assassination?!?!

Heh.

Just gonna sit here and listen to the music

be well and have a good one

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8 users have voted.

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

joe shikspack's picture

@enhydra lutris

heh, if the links between the haiti insurgents and various unsavory american paramilitary groups wasn't so normal, it would be time for popcorn to go with your listening session. but, no, it's just the international version of the "florida man" news stories.

happy listening!

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7 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

The air is clearer and there was a nice breeze tonight.

ETA

Wow.

Sure there has always been flash floods in the south, but not on this scale. Climate change?

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5 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.