Month: December 2024
Gaetz Report Paid $90k ƒor Sex and Drugs While in Congress
$90,000
The House Ethics Committee released the report on its yearslong investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R, FL-1) yesterday. Read the 37-page document here (click “Committee Report”). The committee found Gaetz obstructed Congress and violated other ethics rules while in office, paying over $90K to 12 women for sex or drugs—including marijuana, ecstasy, and cocaine. One of the girls allegedly paid for sex was 17 years old at the time; multiple women were transported over state lines for the purpose of sex.
No Sale (Again) on Greenland, Mr. Trump
“Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale.”
— Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Egede said Monday the autonomous island is not for sale after President-elect Donald Trump said owning Greenland “is an absolute necessity” for the U.S., The Hill reports.
Shameless, Not Blameless
His last motions to suppress were frenetic,
But the ethics committee was unapologetic.
While money, sex and drugs did abound,
In the end the committee found
That Matt Gaetz simply has no shame, morals or ethics.
Murphy: We’re Not a Democracy Anymore
“When the media decides to start hedging, or not telling the full story, combined with people being reluctant to engage in political opposition because they fear they will land in jail, that’s just not a democracy any longer. And it’s not like we’re six months away from that. It feels like we might be a month away from a world in which people start to retreat from politics for fear of criminal prosecution, and the media just uses kid gloves in dealing with the regime. I don’t think this is hypothetical two years from now; we may be living in a very restricted democratic space in January.”
— Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), speaking to Greg Sargent on The Daily Blast.
U.S. Life Expectancy Up for First Time Since Pandemic
78.4
U.S. life expectancy rose last year, hitting its highest level since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reports NBC News. The report, released Thursday, found that life expectancy at birth was 78.4 years in 2023. That’s a significant rise — nearly a full year — from the life expectancy of 77.5 years in 2022.
Alabama Can’t Quit Enslaving People The state profits from leasing prisoners to private companies, including Best Western, Budweiser and Burger King
AP: No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama. With a sprawling labor system that dates back more than 150 years — including the brutal convict leasing era that replaced slavery — it has constructed a template for the commercialization of mass incarceration.
Best Western, Bama Budweiser and Burger King are among the more than 500 businesses to lease incarcerated workers from one of the most violent, overcrowded and unruly prison systems in the U.S. in the past five years alone, The Associated Press found as part of a two-year investigation into prison labor. The cheap, reliable labor force has generated more than $250 million for the state since 2000 through money garnished from prisoners’ paychecks.
Biden Commutes Death Sentences of 37 Convicted Murderers
37
President Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of nearly all prisoners on federal death row, sparing the lives of 37 men just a month before Donald J. Trump will return to the Oval Office with a promise to restart federal executions, the New York Times reports. Those affected by Mr. Biden’s action, all of whom were convicted of murder, will serve life imprisonment without the possibility of parole instead of facing execution. Only three men, who each carried out notorious mass killings, will remain on federal death row.
Poll: Anti-Education Politics Risks Brain Drain from Southern Schools and Universities Sixty percent of southern academics "could not recommend their state as a desirable place to work"
Nature Magazine: A survey of faculty members working in US southern states shows that a significant majority frequently witness or experience political interference that affects morale and is causing many to look for positions in other regions or to leave academia altogether.
The survey, which ran in August 2024, was distributed mostly by the southern regional chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and garnered responses from 2,924 self-selected participants. Of these, 51% identified as female, 17% identified as non-white and more than 60% held tenured positions. The survey found that nearly 60% of respondents could not recommend their state as a desirable place to work. Nearly 50% said that politics and policy changes had reduced the numbers of job applicants to their institutions.
“This is an issue that faculty members are worried about, and that’s going to become a bigger problem for state institutions in large parts of the country,” says Amy Reid, who until August led New College of Florida’s gender-studies programme in Sarasota.
