Former grocery store manager and State of Jefferson pitchman Chris Kelstrom finished second in the District 5 supervisor race. Photo source: A News Cafe/Facebook screenshot.
A News Cafe: “Fascism isn’t too strong of a word for an undertaking that was sparked two years ago by Cottonwood militia member Zapata’s threat to turn his minions loose on the public if Shasta County didn’t stop following the state’s COVID-19 mandates. This gang of dead-end MAGA Trumpublicans, anti-science ‘medical freedom’ advocates, gun-toting militia enthusiasts, State of Jefferson secessionists and white-Christian nationalists came to us literally wrapped in the flag brandishing the cross. It seeks to impose its own dystopic vision of America upon the rest of us.”
UNCOVERED! Top Secret facility where Bill Gates makes fake meat in PEACHTREE DISHES
Mediaite: “The government totally wants to provide surveillance on every part of your life,” [Georgia GQP Rep. Marjorie Taylor] Greene said during a recent broadcast of ‘MTG Live.’ ‘They want to know when you’re eating. They want to know if you’re eating a cheeseburger, which is very bad because Bill Gates wants you to eat his fake meat that grows in a peach tree dish. So you’ll probably get a little zap inside your body that’ll say ‘No, no, don’t eat a real cheeseburger, you need to eat…the fake meat from Bill Gates.’
“The freshman representative added that ‘they probably also want to know when you go to the bathroom and if your bowel movements are on time or consistent.’”
Texas Tribune: “Beto O’Rourke caused a dramatic scene Wednesday when he angrily confronted Gov. Greg Abbott at his the governor’s news conference about the school shooting, yelling, ‘This is on you.’
“O’Rourke, who is running for governor against Abbott, moved to the third row of the Uvalde High School auditorium about 15 minutes after the governor began speaking to the media alongside other state and local leaders onstage. When Abbott concluded his comments and introduced Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, O’Rourke rose and walked to the stage and spoke directly to Abbott.
“’You are doing nothing,’ O’Rourke said. ‘You are offering up nothing. You said this was not predictable. This was totally predictable when you choose not to do anything.’”
Immediately after interrupting Abbott’s news conference spoke to the media. “There are family members that are crying as we speak,” he said. “There are family members whose hearts are broken. There’s no words that anybody shouting can come up here and do anything to heal these broken hearts.”
PoliticalWire: “Shortly after the nation’s latest mass shooting, which killed at least 18 children at an elementary school in Texas, the California Senate passed a bill Tuesday to allow private citizens to file suit for at least $10,000 — a bounty-hunter provision modeled on a Texas abortion law — against makers or sellers of untraceable ghost guns or illegal assault weapons,” the [paywalled] San Francisco Chronicle reports.
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation this week in Miami (of course) establishing a “Victims of Communism Day” on Nov. 7 and decreeing that Florida public school students will receive 45 minutes of indoctrination about the victims of Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and, of course, Fidel Castro, my first thought was, We need a Victims of Capitalism Day — and fast!
Come to find out there already is one. Or, more accurately, there is a movement already extant to defend capitalism and deny its victims. I know, shocker, right?
If you do a Google search for “victims of capitalism,” the first link on the page is to the Nassau Institute. The banner at the top of the institute’s website is the cover of Ayn Rand’s “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.” Triggered!
This is from the institute’s “About” link:
Founded in 1995 The Nassau Institute is a research institute – a think tank – that promotes capitalism and free markets. Our mission is to formulate and promote public policies for The Bahamas based on the principles of limited government, individual freedom, and the rule of law.
So, a country that is historically majority Black and that was a slave state until the British Empire outlawed slavery in 1833 — in other words, has a population that would not have been in the Bahamas if it were not for capitalism — the slave trade — has an “institute” that perpetuates capitalism? What’s wrong with this picture? […]
Alito’s ruling says the right to abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution. Hey Ginni and Clarence, do you know what else is not mentioned in the Constitution? The right to mixed-race marriage. If you think they won’t overturn Loving v Virginia, you haven’t been paying attention.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., is running for reelection, so it’s unlikely that the I don’t think the Democratic Party he’s criticizing is the one he leads in California. It must be the national party led by Pres. Biden and V.P. Kamala Harris, Newsom’s former state attorney general. He certainly sounds like a candidate in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary.
CBS News: “Rents, which are rising by double-digits nationwide, are positively ballooning across Florida, fueled by a surge of people who relocated to the state during the pandemic. Florida’s population is growing faster than any state but Texas: Between 2020 and 2021, 300,000 people moved to the Sunshine State.
“In February, Realtor.com designated Miami as America’s least affordable place to live. Average monthly rents in the metro area, at $2,930, are on par with San Francisco and Los Angeles — and double the level considered affordable for people in the region given the local median income. Miami, Orlando and Tampa have the fastest-growing rents in the country over the past year.”
Miami Herald: As Florida legislators were rushing through passage of a bill to repeal the special district that governs Walt Disney World last week, they failed to notice an obscure provision in state law that says the state could not do what legislators were doing — unless the district’s bond debt was paid off.
Disney, however, noticed and quietly sent a note to its investors to show that it was confident the Legislature’s attempt to dissolve the special taxing district operating the 39-square mile parcel it owned in two counties violated the “pledge” the state made when it enacted the district in 1967, and therefore was not legal. The result, Disney told its investors, is that it would continue to go about business as usual.
We’ve all been recruited to be on Madison Cawthorn Watch,
To keep up with when he’s lying or wearing lingerie and such.
It’s hard to take him seriously
When he just laughs deliriously,
When his friend videotapes his hand on Maddie’s crotch.
“Even if we cut some slack for Esper and all the others who served as honorably and conscientiously as they could until they were faced with either the dead end of resignation or being fired, the fact is that these men and women remained silent for far too long once they were out of government service. They held back important things that the American people and their elected representatives needed to know. They kept them as their own personal secrets, either out of some misplaced sense of bureaucratic propriety, or because they had a book deal and didn’t want to steal their own thunder from release day.”
“As Thomas settles into his fourth decade on the Supreme Court, his influence, even his control, is ascendant. Thomas began his career as a justice as a near outcast – an ideological fringe figure and a scarred veteran of a brutal confirmation fight. Today, he is a revered figure in the conservative movement, and he is watching ideas he championed from the margins turn into the law of the land.”
“Bill O’Reilly’s really talented. He’s more talented than I am… But I think there’s a deep phoniness at the center of his shtick… built on perception that he is the character he plays… The moment that it’s revealed not to be true it’s over.”
— Tucker Carlson, on C-SPAN on September 13, 2003.
The percentage of roughly 450 total deadly political attacks in the United Sates committed by right-wing extremists in the past decade as counted by the Anti-Defamation League, according to the New York Times. The ADL found that 20 percent were committed by Islamic extremists and 4 percent by liberals.
“The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to five Republican members of Congress, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, who refused to meet with the panel voluntarily,” the New York Times reports. “The committee’s leaders had previously been reluctant to issue subpoenas to their fellow lawmakers. That is an extraordinarily rare step for most congressional committees to take, though the House Ethics Committee, which is responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct by members, is known to do so.”
“In what may prove to be Florida’s last stand as a battleground state, Democrats are launching a $15 million voter organizing effort ahead of this year’s elections,” Politico reports. “Democratic candidates up and down the ballot — even those running in contested primaries — have agreed to pour in money that will be used to hire at least 200 organizers and open as many as 80 offices as part of a coordinated effort to pump up turnout across the state.”
A Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has dropped nearly 40 points among registered voters since 2020, when former Pres. Trump began packing the court with right-wing extremists. Overall confidence in the Court is down from 70 percent in September 2020 to 51 percent today. Among those who expressed no confidence in the court, the number has risen 19 points, from 7 percent in 2020 to 26 percent today.
Charles Gaba: “For the full year 2021, official Covid deaths ran more than three times higher in the reddest tenth of the U.S. than the bluest. This is something I’ve been tracking and writing about for nearly a year now, so while it’s pretty dramatic, it’s nothing new.” “What is new is the ‘other’ excess deaths in 2021: They ran a jaw-dropping twenty-one times higher in the reddest decile than the bluest… nearly 50 per 100K residents vs. only ~2.3 per 100K.”
