7/14/21 Biden's Speech was an Epic, But…

President Biden got plenty of praise for his oratory on Tuesday in Philadelphia. He did a spectacular job of trashing the Big Lie and of adding wings to the importance of an American's right to vote.

“There’s an unfolding assault taking place in America today, an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote and fair and free elections. An assault on democracy. An assault on liberty. An assault on who we are, an assault on who we are as Americans. For make no mistake: Bullies and merchants of fear and peddlers of lies are threatening the very foundations of our country,” Biden said.

When it was all over, civil rights groups were standing there looking at each other and saying, "So what about the filibuster?" Fact is, Senate Republicans are still holding up the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Joe Biden loves bipartisanship. But so do the Democrats' two spoilers, Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrstan Sinema (D-AZ).

"This is the moment. There is no more time,"said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "We must have legislation. We must have the President use his voice, use his influence, use his power, and use what he clearly understands about this moment."

"Good speech, so what's the strategy? #EndTheFilibusterNow," tweeted Black Voters Matter co-founder LaTosha Brown.

To 50-some Texas Democratic legislators who are hunkering down in Washington, DC in a last-ditch effort to block the state's "Jim Crow 2.0" voting bill, it had to be a deep disappointment. They're all but begging the federal legislators to take action. Meanwhile, they're being threatened with arrest by the state's Trump-mimicking governor, who has actually sent the Texas Rangers -- law enforcement, not a southern hockey team -- to track them down.

“What we hope we’ll hear is an even stronger commitment and a clear plan of action for how we can break the gridlock in the Senate and pass voting rights legislation,” the Texas Democratic Caucus leader said, before a Tuesday slate of speaking with federal lawmakers.

Let's hope they made progress there, because in Biden's speech, they heard anything but.

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What should Biden do to push through changes in the filibuster? Why hasn't he done them already? What will it take to get the majority party, who represent the majority of the country, to grasp the power they need from stonewalling GOP legislators?

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/13/politics/biden-voting-rights-speech-black-leaders/index.html

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/562785-acknowledging-few-options-at-home-texas-democrats-urge-congressional-action

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-trump-big-lie_n_60edd223e4b01ba8eed00b52

7/16/21 Shooter Who Murdered Five at Capitol Gazette is Found Criminally Responsible

In June 2018, Jarrod Ramos entered a local newspaper office in Annapolis and shot five people to death. He was angry about a 2011 article that described his conviction for harassment.

In October 2019, Ramos pled guilty to 23 felony counts, including five counts of first-degree murder. However, he said he wasn't criminally responsible, which is Maryland's equivalent of an insanity plea.

If Ramos wasn't criminally responsible, he'd spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric facility. But to the families of those Ramos had killed, it was all about whether their loved ones would receive justice. They wanted Ramos in prison for life.

"You can look around and see there's a lot more than five [victims]," said the widow of a shooting victim. "There are a lot of people who couldn’t be here today because they have to choke on their own words when they talk about this horrific crime.”

In the jury trial that concluded yesterday, Ramos was found criminally responsible. It was a dramatic trial, with battling diagnoses of Ramos's personality problems that ranged from narcissism to autism to delusions.

The prosecution, however, had a celebrated court-ordered psychiatrist whose conclusion that Ramos knew what he was doing was backed up with a report detailing nearly two dozen reasons. One was that Ramos seemed to take pleasure in the killings. "There's no mental disorder that accounts for that," she said.

When the verdict was read after just two hours' deliberation, there was noticeable relief among the victims' families.

Ramos will be sentenced in September.

https://wtop.com/blog/2021/07/latest-updates-capital-gazette-newspaper-shooter-jarrod-ramos-on-trial/

7/14/21 Another School, Another 215 Unmarked Indigenous Graves in British Columbia

The tragedy of lost children has never ended for Canada's Indigenous tribes. From the latter part of the 19th century until the 1970s, indigenous parents had their children taken to school, sometimes by force, and never return.

At least 160 of the "undocumented and unmarked" graves announced on Monday were from the Penelakut Tribe in British Columbia, the others from neighboring tribes that also had children sent to the Kuper Island Residential School. It was on one of BC's Southern Gulf Islands.

"We are at another point in time where we must face the trauma because of these acts of genocide. Each time we do, it is possible to heal a little more," the Penelakut Tribe said in a statement, which was posted by the neighboring Cowichan Tribes's Facebook page.

The Kuper Island school was called Canada's Alcatraz, according to survivors. Some students did indeed try to get away by water, desperate to escape the abuse at the school, which included physical and sexual abuse and neglect. When parents asked after a child who was no longer at the school, they were told that the child had run away.

Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created to investigate abuses of indigenous groups, has reported that more than 4,000 indigenous children in residential schools died either from neglect or abuse. All over the country, projects to find these buried children are underway, using ground-penetrating radar and other methods to find long-abandoned graves.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/13/americas/canada-unmarked-indigenous-graves/index.html

7/11/21 The Mouth from Mar-a-Lago Blasts the Infrastructure Bill

Ex-president Donald Trump spoke up on Friday in his latest effort to poison the waters for Democratic legislation.

"You are just being played by the Radical Left Democrats—they will give you nothing!” he said. “Fake infrastructure proposals being put forward by Democrats, almost all of which goes to the ridiculous Green New Deal Marxist agenda. Keep the Trump Administration's tax cuts just where they are.”

The semi-coherent rant would, from other ex-Presidents, be described as a way to protect their legacies. From Trump, it's just saying "You have to do it my way!" But I digress.

Trump's statement will put pressure on the Republican lawmakers who have gone in hook, line, and sinker for the votes of Trump supporters.

That does not bode well for the Democrats' plan, spelled out by Chuck Schumer, to pass two infrastructure bills, one that is bipartisan and will cost $1.2 trillion over 8 years, and a second one that will address the aims of Democrats, lawmakers return from the July 4 recess.

In making these remarks he did, Trump is trying to overturn the bipartisan agreement and sink the additional infrastructure spending that Democrats propose.

Mitch McConnell is already talking stonewall. "This is going to be a hell of a fight over what this country ought to look like in the future," McConnell said on Tuesday. "I don't think we've had a bigger difference of opinion between the two parties."

McConnell said, too, "This is not going to be done on a bipartisan basis." It's a surprising remark, given that we haven't seen McConnell in a bipartisan negotiation since Clinton, or earlier.

But that's what you can expect from the America's worst president in living memory.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/562391-trump-tells-gop-lawmakers-to-halt-infrastructure-push-you-are

7/13/21 Texas Punishes Voter Who Didn't Know He Was Ineligible

By any definition, the prosecution of Hervis Rogers will be a show trial.

In another case of the GOP's mean-spirited rage to shut down the minority vote, Texas's Attorney General, Ken Paxton, ordered Rogers's arrest because Rogers was four months shy of the end of his parole when he voted in the 2020 Democratic primary.

Rogers waited more than 6 hours to vote, till 1 a.m., and at the time, he was celebrated for his perseverance. Now, he's in jail with a $100,000 bond and an ACLU lawyer to defend him.

Did we mention that Rogers is Black?

Problem is, Rogers did break election law, and his only defense is that he didn't know he couldn't vote. In 2007, then-Governor Rick Perry vetoed a bill that would inform released felons about the date they'd be eligible to vote again. But you can't blame anything on a governor these days.

A Texas lawmaker, a Democrat, has recently introduced another bill about informing released law-offenders when they will again be eligible to vote. We say, Dream on.

And there is another problem: Rogers did the same thing in 2018 -- voted when he was ineligible. Worse, Rogers has been in the pen three times for robbery or burglary. That means that he's looking at up to 40 more years in prison if he's convicted.

If Paxton wanted to find a baddie for conservatives to hate, Rogers fits. Still, as an ACLU lawyer put it, "Our laws should not intimidate people from voting by increasing the risk of prosecution for, at worst, innocent mistakes."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/amid-voter-suppression-push-texas-to-prosecute-man-celebrated-for-waiting-in-long-line_n_60eb31bce4b00edbf384496a

7/13/21 How to Bring Media Liars to Heel? Threaten their Bank Accounts!

When you're looking at $4.3 billion in lawsuits, it's hard not to blink.

So when ex-President and forever liar Donald Trump trotted out his claims of a stolen election at the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend, Fox News ran a disclaimer under Trump's yammering face saying, “The voting system companies have denied the various allegations made by President Trump and his counsel regarding the 2020 election.”

The lawsuits came about following Fox News's repeated airing of ludicrous conspiracy theories, many of them pulling in potshots at voting-system companies, from conservative pundits supporting Trump's Big Lie.

Dominion and Smartmatic, both major makers of voting systems, filed richly deserved lawsuits for libel against the media company. Dominion filed for $1.6 billion; Smartmatic filed for $2.7 billion.

From this side of the fence (the outside), it seems there is no doubt whatsoever that both companies would win in court -- if ever a broadcast outlet lied with malicious intent, Fox News did, repeatedly.

Mediaite.com, which we haven't noticed till now, says that the disclaimer ran for 38 seconds.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fox-news-cpac-trump-disclaimer_n_60ebb9d1e4b07afbc3492083

7/12/21 GOP Rep. Kinzinger Calls Greene and Boebert "Garbage Politicians"

While Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert continue babbling bubble-headed comparisons between COVID vaccination drives and Nazi Germany, they're driving politicians to distance themselves from the two. Last week it was the Republican Women's PAC; on Sunday, it was Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.)

Kinziger has already spoken up several times about the pair, but today he had a bully pulpit at CNN's State of the Union. He called their accusations "absolute insanity."

“This is outrage politics that is being played by my party,” Kinzinger said. “Our party has been hijacked, my party has been hijacked. It is on its way to the ground, and for some people, it’s a fun ride, right? We can put this outrageous stuff on Twitter . . . but this plane is gonna crash into the ground.”

But Greene and Boebert seem irrepressible. Only recently, Greene was calling COVID-19 “a political tool used to control people,” claimed that the vaccines were not FDA-approved (they were), and said that people "don’t need your (Biden's) medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations,” she said on Twitter, only days after visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.

Boebert tweeted on Thursday that Biden "has deployed his Needle Nazis to Mesa County" in her state of Colorado. In rewsponse, the Auschwitz Memorial tweeted a dignified but fairly straightforward response: “Instrumentalization of the tragedy of all people who ... were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the hateful totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany to argue against vaccination that saves human lives is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.”

At this point, it seems that the rest of the GOP is perfectly okay with Kinsinger carrying the weight of talking back to this pair of neoconservate cuckoos. There've been a comments from others, notably the Senate and House Minority Leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy -- but Kinzinger is the one hammering at the craziness again and again.

"The vaccine is safe. Covid is real. Get vaccinated," he said in the CNN interview yesterday. "I call on every leader in the Republican party to stand up, say 'get vaccinated,' and to call out these garbage politicians . . . playing on your vaccine fears for their own selfish gain."

Unfortunately, with these two, common sense talk is falling on deaf ears.  

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/adam-kinzinger-marjorie-taylor-greene-lauren-boebert_n_60eb672fe4b04f9dbf93d792

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marjorie-taylor-greene-holocaust-vaccine-comparisons_n_60e508fce4b095e78103950a