In an interview Thursday with the Daily Signal, a conservative media site, the U.S. senator from Kentucky said “it’d be great” if the protests spread to Washington, D.C., when asked about his thoughts on the protests and how the nation’s capital would react if they spread south across the border.
“The thing is, it wouldn’t shut the city down because the government workers haven’t come to work in two years anyway, so I don’t know if it’d affect D.C.,” Paul joked. “It’d be nice change. We’d actually have some traffic.”
“I hope the truckers do come to America, and I hope they clog up cities,” Paul said. “We’re seeing a break in the dam now. Several Democratic governors are finally sort of relinquishing. What they’re finding is moms and dads are upset about this, they’re not just Republicans. Everybody is upset about this.”
Remember Rand Paul has large investments in medical companies that produce treatments for covid. it is to his benefit to keep people getting sick and needing medical help / treatment for Covid. So why do what is right when he can stuff his pockets with money from the suffering of the people.
"The thing is, it wouldn't shut the city down because the government workers haven't come to work in two years anyway, so I don't know if it'd affect D.C.," Paul joked. "It'd be nice change. We'd actually have some traffic." https://t.co/m1cXuQAoNZ
Rand Paul calls on truckers to blockade the Super Bowl and DC: “I’m all for it. Civil disobedience .. is a time-honored tradition in our country from slavery to civil rights to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.” pic.twitter.com/zvCBTe9wkg
The nature preserve on the US-Mexico border became a target of rightwing ire after it opposed construction of Trump’s wall
Marianna Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center: ‘I used to believe much better of people.’ Photograph: John L Mone/AP
In Mission, Texas, on the border between the US and Mexico, sits the National Butterfly Center. A 100-acre nature preserve once exclusively dedicated to the conservation of plants and wildlife, it has now been thrust into the national spotlight and become a focal point of divisions over the country’s immigration policy.
This week, the butterfly center was forced to close its doors indefinitely amid ongoing threats from far-right conspiracists and QAnon followers who falsely claim it is a haven for human-trafficking and illegal migration.
“They’re not conspiracies, they’re just outright lies,” Marianna Treviño-Wright, the executive director of the National Butterfly Center, told the Guardian. “I think that’s a very important point that needs to be made. As long as they’re called ‘conspiracies’, then it seems like there’s some plausibility.”
The North American Butterfly Association (NABA), which runs the center, decided to close it down indefinitely on Wednesday as a precautionary measure, after being warned to “be armed at all times or out of town” during a We Stand America rally in support of a border wall.
The butterfly center first attracted the attention of the far right in 2017. Treviño-Wright and the NABA made headlines for suing the organizations behind the construction of a section of Donald Trump’s border wall after they sought to build straight through the butterfly preserve. Those groups included We Build the Wall, led by Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon and founder Brian Kolfage, which is now facing corruption and fraud charges.
Conspiracy theories about the butterfly center snowballed after Kolfage posted a series of tweets, claiming it was run by “left wing thugs with a sham butterfly agenda” and asserting without evidence that “rampant sex trade” was taking place on the property. Treviño-Wright said an increase in online and in-person harassment soon followed.
A court date for the case about the section of border wall on the center’s property has not been set yet.
Treviño-Wright said since the lawsuit she has faced personal threats and on one occasion, assault, by the extremist Virginia Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Lowe who visited the butterfly center last month and demanded to see “‘illegals crossing on rafts”. In an audio recording of the visit, Lowe is heard claiming baselessly that Treviño-Wright was “OK with children being sex-trafficked, raped and murdered”.
“It’s utterly ridiculous that instead of Democrats and a pizza joint, it’s immigrants and a butterfly center,” Treviño-Wright said, comparing the situation to the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy that took off in 2016 in an attempt to paint the then presidential candidate Hilary Clinton as a proponent of human trafficking.
The butterfly center’s closure this week did not come as a surprise to Treviño-Wright.
“This has been escalating. Not just the attacks on us, but the agenda in the political landscape. I think it makes sense for the [NABA] board to pump the brakes. If this madness is going to continue until the midterms or, God forbid, beyond that, we need to have personnel and a plan in place to protect ourselves as best as possible to be prepared for this horrible situation.”
Marianna Treviño-Wright stands near a section of the new border wall in Mission, Texas. Photograph: Eric Gay/AP
Treviño-Wright said the construction of sections of the border wall, andthe subsequent vitriol that came from QAnon followers and Trump supporters, had a profound effect on the butterfly center and its staff.
“When you’re targeted by laws that are designed to be destructive, it’s very difficult to continue operations as normal. So it’s been disruptive. It’s been destructive. And it’s made it very difficult for us to focus on our mission, which is environmental conservation and education.”
Choking back tears, Treviño-Wright explained the events of recent years had put a strain on her mental health and personal relationships.
“It really has made me a misanthrope. I used to believe much better of people, but now I’m afraid to even go to the grocery store because I can’t trust that the person with the cart next to me doesn’t believe” the lies, Treviño-Wright said.
On her accidental venture into political activism, Treviño-Wright called herself: “Utterly reluctant, unwilling, and anxious-to-not-be-here-or-be-doing-this-any-more.”
The butterfly center is now sharing strategies for dealing with confrontational conspiracists with the Children’s Museum of Denver, which was forcibly shut down after anti-maskers frequently directed their anger towards staff.
Treviño-Wright said she didn’t know if her center would reopen, but “certainly hope[s] it does.
“It’s a magical place and it’s a place I’ve poured the last 10 years of my life into developing and defending. I hope there’s a wonderful future in store for the National Butterfly Center, but as long as these people get away with these things, I’m not sure of anything. Not just for anything but for our entire country.
“It’s just unbelievable that somehow things have reached this point in American history that a nature center stands at the crossroads of whether our country slides full-on into authoritarianism or our democratic republic survives.”
Miami-Dade Elections Department 2021-22 records show more than 5,000 registered Democrats switched their party affiliation to Republican. The increase comes just as more victims of third-party registrations are coming forward to report that their voter registration was altered without their permission.
All of the victims were older than 65 years old, live in Miami-Dade County, and all of them were outraged when they learned they were registered as Republicans. “People are being taken advantage of,” Sen. Annette Taddeo said. “Lots of these people don’t speak English or are elderly.”
Sometime in early December, Juan A. Salazar, a 77-year-old Dominican living in Little Havana, exited the elevator of his building tower in his electric wheelchair to get some fresh air in the parking lot out front, as he usually does.
But he recalls that on that particular day, a group of three canvassers wearing red caps and t-shirts that said “Republican Party of Florida” approached him.
According to Salazar, the three workers asked him if he wanted to fill out an application to get his new voter ID card. He told the canvassers there was no need — he knew he got one automatically in the mail before every general election. But the canvassers insisted. “You will get it faster,” Salazar recalled them saying.
Several Miami residents, many of whom are Hispanic and over 60 years old, are now coming forward with their own claims about having their party affiliation changed from Democrat to Republican after interacting with canvassers. https://t.co/JFwLvfw40F
Last Nov, Florida Republican voter registration surpassed Democrats by @ 4,000 votes. Included in that- >5,000 Miami Dade Democrats recorded as “switched”. Now more senior voters are telling us- they didn’t know their party affiliations changed. Our report tonight @WPLGLocal10 ⏩ pic.twitter.com/HiVzHSZSEV
The financier famed for bankrolling some of Steve Bannon’s best-known ventures, as well as the far-right strategist’s jet-setting lifestyle, is in deep trouble for steering a $28 million yacht—the same boat where federal agents arrested Bannon in 2020—out of American waters.
A New York judge slapped Guo Wengui, who also uses the aliases Kwok Ho Wan and Miles Guo, with $134 million in contempt of court fines on Wednesday for violating multiple restraining orders barring him from selling or relocating the boat or any other property he controls.
The high price tag results from nearly a year of the fugitive Chinese national defying the court’s order that he return the craft to a U.S. port—an order that carried a daily forfeiture of $500,000.
The yacht is being sought as an asset to cover unpaid loans allegedly owed to a Hong Kong investment firm.
Wengui is also the chief financial backer of the social media platform GETTR.
Several years ago he and Bannon flew banner planes around Manhattan which declared them to be the Chinese government in exile.
Wengui presently lives in a $68 million Manhattan penthouse.
A New York judge slapped Guo Wengui with $134 million in contempt of court fines on Wednesday for violating multiple restraining orders barring him from selling or relocating the boat or any other property he controls. https://t.co/yBwR1f7ZgS
There is a maga group trying to finish destroying a very important preserve that tRump against court rulings just started destroying for his vanity wall. They want the preserve gone, revoked , or just ruined beyond ability to function so they can get their wall section that wont make a bit of difference.
Yes that would cause kid real distress. Funny thing about those who think that teaching history about slavery causes white kids discomfort forget is black kids experience racism long before they start school.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Misleading right wing media cartoons / memes
I find the misleading right wing media’s obsession with a civil servant weird. Dr Fauci is accomplished yes, but he only a bureaucrat. He has no power or authority to make rules and regulations. His only task is to advise based on his skill and education, like others in the government. Yet the right has developed an almost cult like mythology around this person. I wonder why? Could it be he is an intelligent well skill person who knows what he is talking about? Could it be he refutes and shoots down all the right wing nonsense over Covid and public health measures? Or could it be he disagreed with the cult leader tRump and the followers of the dear leader must now attack him with everything they have to protect the snowflake that claimed Covid would just disappear like magic called tRump? I wonder?
Silly cartoon. China doesn’t allow protests and has ever person allowed to enter the stadium vetted. No one would dare protest.
I know no leftist will ever concede this truth, but if we hadn’t had the mandates and lockdowns and monetary incentives we’d actually be better off now and would’ve lost less people, regardless of any vaccines existing.
Right wing cartoon comment sections I commented on
The Oklahoma Legislature started its 2022 session this week with a slew of anti-abortion bills, which isn’t uncommon. “This is my 12th year in the legislature now, and it feels like every year we go through this,” said Oklahoma House Minority Leader Emily Virgin (D).
But this year’s anti-abortion bills ― 11 were pre-filed before the legislative session even began ― bring fresh menace. The state’s Republican governor has already promised that he would sign any abortion restriction the Oklahoma Legislature sends his way. Moreover, some bills, which clearly go beyond what’s allowed by Roe v. Wade and normally would immediately get bogged down in the court system, could actually become law given the looming U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which could upend five decades of abortion rights.
And the bills coming to the floor range from extreme to downright dystopian, including one that would create a state-run database of some pregnant people in the state.
“[W]e have absolutely seen the bills get more and more extreme,” said Virgin. “That’s due to the national landscape and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. I think the anti-abortion movement has been strengthened and emboldened by that. And with our current governor, it’s pretty likely that he’ll sign any anti-abortion bill that makes it to his desk.”
Last year alone, Oklahoma passed a six-week abortion ban, a “trigger” ban if the high court rules against Roe v. Wade, a total ban and restrictions on medication abortion and other measures restricting reproductive rights (almost all have been blocked in lower courts).
The 2022 pre-filed bills include two six-week abortion bans and a total ban with similar enforcement mechanisms to Texas’ draconian restriction that deputizes private citizens to sue to enforce the law. Other proposed measures give personhood status to fetuses, ban abortion at 30 days and add a constitutional amendment declaring Oklahoma does not protect the right to abortion.
The most radical of the bunch is Senate Bill 1167, filed by state Sen. George Burns (R). Titled the Every Mother Matters Act, or EMMA, it would establish a government database for pregnant people looking to get abortions in Oklahoma. Each pregnant person will call a hotline and be connected with a “pre-abortion resource” assistant, but that person is legally not allowed to refer a patient to an abortion provider. The pregnant person would then be assigned a “unique identifying number” in the database, and abortion providers would be mandated to keep the information for seven years.
As part of the program, the woman will “be connected with a care agent who will provide, at no cost to her, an assessment of eligibility and offer assistance in obtaining support services, other than abortion, for her or the unborn child’s biological father,” according to a press statement from Burns’ office. The services include information on adoption, housing, employment, child care and more, but not on abortion care. It is unclear if the hotline assistants will have any medical expertise in reproductive care, but the legislation does bar anyone who’s worked for an abortion clinic in the past from signing up to be a resource agent.
“Many women facing unexpected pregnancies turn to abortion because they feel like they have no choice. We want to make sure they have an opportunity to connect with medical, financial and other resources that they may not know about,” Burns said in the press statement. “This legislation will do that as well as provide screening to identify those who’ve been victims of crime so that, with the woman’s consent, a report can be made to the appropriate law enforcement agency.”
Burns added that his “ultimate goal is ending abortion.” He did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
But, like so many of Oklahoma’s pre-filed abortion restrictions, S.B. 1167 is redundant. Oklahoma already has informed-consent laws that require pregnant people be told about parenting and adoption as abortion alternatives.
The proposed legislation is “truly off the deep end,” said Kristin Ford, vice president of communications and research at NARAL Pro-Choice America. “This bill is just so beyond the bounds of what any rational person would consider an appropriate role for politicians to play in people’s personal lives and family decisions.”
“Despite the framing that this is about helping folks, it’s pretty obvious that this is about expanding the state’s surveillance apparatus over pregnant people. People who aren’t even seeking abortion are going to fall under the surveillance apparatus, too.”
– Grace Howard, author of “The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood”
Tracking pregnant people who are seeking abortions is a slippery slope, added Grace Howard, an assistant professor of justice studies at San Jose State University who is writing a book, “The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood.”
“Despite the framing that this is about helping folks, it’s pretty obvious that this is about expanding the state’s surveillance apparatus over pregnant people. People who aren’t even seeking abortion are going to fall under the surveillance apparatus, too,” Howard said.
“The resources that are spent on this redundant, unhelpful and burdensome abortion legislation could be better utilized,” said Dr. Joshua Yap, an abortion provider for Planned Parenthood Great Plains’ Tulsa clinic.
If any of these restrictions pass ― but especially something like a 30-day or six-week abortion ban ― they won’t only affect Oklahomans. For five months now, Texans have been coming to Oklahoma to receive abortion care due to the Lone Star State’s extreme six-week abortion ban. Yap told HuffPost in November that his clinic staff had to double- or even triple-book their schedule to accommodate patients, 75% of which were from Texas.
Oklahoma abortion clinics were already booking weeks out when the Texas ban went into effect, delaying care and pushing people farther and farther into pregnancy. Those ripple effects will be even greater if Oklahoma’s access to abortion is further limited.
Yap believes Oklahoma and Texas patients who can travel will head to Kansas, a neighboring state that only has four clinics left. “Barely six months ago, we were trying to prepare ourselves emotionally for the Texas law going into effect, and now we’re having to re-brace ourselves going into this legislative session,” he said. “It feels like we’re really powerless from preventing these measures from going through.”
The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, involving a Mississippi bill, is expected sometime this spring. Most advocates and pro-abortion rights lawmakers are not very optimistic given the court’s conservative majority.
When asked how Virgin, the Oklahoma House Democratic leader, is feeling about the pending decision, she responded that she’s scared.
“It’s scary to think about not having all of the health care options available to folks who find themselves in that situation. I’ve talked to people who run the gamut of reasons why they seek abortion care, and I think of all of them when I think about Roe potentially being overturned,” she said.
“We know that across the country, people do believe that there should be a right to access this kind of care. Whether it gets overturned or not, I think that we still have to fight for those options to be available.”
Walmart is almost exclusively self-check out now while bragging they create American jobs. And let's get one thing straight: I refuse to use these machines because I do not work for Walmart.
.@RbReich says it best: there’s no “labor shortage” that’s pushing up wages. There’s a shortage of good-paying jobs that would support working families. Raising interest rates right now will only hurt working families more. https://t.co/TALAuh8H9r
This has to be a parody. Can’t be real. Not an actual-live human being who decided to say this publicly. You can’t convince otherwise. No way. https://t.co/MfldSAezMQ
Specious reasoning: any argument or analysis that has the apparent ring of truth or plausibility but is actually incomplete, deceptive, or even altogether fallacious. https://t.co/xjE40VXK5I
This is not to argue Dems couldn't and shouldn't expand the court, they absolutely should
But SCOTUS Republicans are likely imagining they can get away with anything because, without something dramatic like court expansion, their majority is securehttps://t.co/9TC5f98Zml
I wrote about the GOP's latest fake racist meme––"Biden handing out crack pipes"–and why dems needs to vigorously defend safe injections sites now rather than doing what they did with ACORN & Shirley Sherrod: forfeit to racist mobs & throw it under the bushttps://t.co/in065WUWEE
THIS SHELTER HAS BEEN THERE FOR YEARS. For 20+ years, certain kids who arrive at the border get sent to shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
If the shelter is too far for a bus, they take a plane.
The death of 16-year-old Carlos Hernandez was tragic and may well have been preventable. The Border Patrol agents who job it was to check in on him lied about doing it, and left him lying in a pool of his own blood for hours while he died.
The US incarcerates more people than any other country. We might want to be careful when throwing around charges of human rights abuses.
“They just want to exclude trans people"
Exclusive: Leaked guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) shows it plans to exclude trans people in Britain from single-sex spaces unless they have a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC).https://t.co/s3P8SaadZA
The facts change and the people responsible for public policy have to change their advice to match the new circumstances.
Complete projection and trying to hide what they are doing. Remember this is the party that is pushing bills to ban subjects from being taught in schools, banning even talking about LGBTQ+, requiring teachers to wear cameras, out kids to parents, has a media arm called Fox News, and trying to call an insurrection riot legitimate political discourse.
I wondered how long it would take for the right wing cartoonist to pick this up. Took less than a day from when Fox News aired a misleading story on it and the cartoonist drawing what the misinformation is. No the US government is not buying crack pipes. They are funding ways to keep addicts from dying or over dosing along with spreading disease. Beau has a good video on this with some of the things the bill funds. So I expect this to be a big shit storm on the comment section of the radical right cartoons.
The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts. Public mask wearing is most effective at reducing spread of the virus when compliance is high.
Leffler et al. (29) used a multiple regression approach, including a range of policy interventions and country and population characteristics, to infer the relationship between mask use and SARS-CoV-2 transmission. They found that transmission was 7.5 times higher in countries that did not have a mask mandate or universal mask use, a result similar to that found in an analogous study of fewer countries (30). Another study looked at the difference between US states with mask mandates and those without, and found that the daily growth rate was 2.0 percentage points lower in states with mask mandates, estimating that the mandates had prevented 230,000 to 450,000 COVID-19 cases by May 22, 2020 (31).
We’re not going away from mask mandates because they’re ineffective. We’re going away from them because the will to use them is evaporating.
I don’t have a problem with people who don’t want to wear a mask, however I do have a problem with people going into establishments without a mask demanding service when the owners of those establishments require their employees to wear a mask. House rules, follow the house rules of get out of the house. If you do get sick are you willing to forgo expecting your health insurance company to pay your medical bills since you decided not to take precautions?
^^^Just can’t stop repeating lies…
Has the U.S.-Mexico border been left completely open for anyone to cross?
No. And we’ve been here before.
In March, we rated False a claim that the border “is now open to anyone from anywhere in the world who wishes to enter our country.” In April, we rated False a claim that the U.S. is locked down and there’s “a wide open border.” And in July, we rated Mostly False a claim that Biden “is restricting travel for Americans into Mexico, but is keeping the border wide open for illegal aliens to walk right into our country.”
Here’s what is happening now.
Biden has continued a policy — initiated by former President Donald Trump — to restrict Americans’ travel to Mexico, as a way to fight the spread of COVID-19. On Nov. 26, after omicron was identified in South Africa, Biden banned travel from South Africa and seven other African countries.
Most people trying to cross at the border into the U.S. are being turned away, under a March 2020 order by the Trump administration to curb the spread of COVID-19. The Biden administration is still enforcing that policy, although it’s exempting children who arrive alone, as well as some families.
Encounters at the southern border rose each month since Biden took office through July, before dropping the next two months. The latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures show there were more than 1.7 million encounters during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.
In September, the last month for which data was available, there were 192,001 encounters, 102,673 of which resulted in expulsion.
No policies have been changed that would make the borders more open, said Michelle Mittelstadt, spokesperson for the Migration Policy Institute.
The claim that the U.S.-Mexico border is completely open is False.
Scottie's Playtime 
^^^Just can’t stop repeating lies…
Has the U.S.-Mexico border been left completely open for anyone to cross?
No. And we’ve been here before.
In March, we rated False a claim that the border “is now open to anyone from anywhere in the world who wishes to enter our country.” In April, we rated False a claim that the U.S. is locked down and there’s “a wide open border.” And in July, we rated Mostly False a claim that Biden “is restricting travel for Americans into Mexico, but is keeping the border wide open for illegal aliens to walk right into our country.”
Here’s what is happening now.
Biden has continued a policy — initiated by former President Donald Trump — to restrict Americans’ travel to Mexico, as a way to fight the spread of COVID-19. On Nov. 26, after omicron was identified in South Africa, Biden banned travel from South Africa and seven other African countries.
Most people trying to cross at the border into the U.S. are being turned away, under a March 2020 order by the Trump administration to curb the spread of COVID-19. The Biden administration is still enforcing that policy, although it’s exempting children who arrive alone, as well as some families.
Encounters at the southern border rose each month since Biden took office through July, before dropping the next two months. The latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures show there were more than 1.7 million encounters during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.
In September, the last month for which data was available, there were 192,001 encounters, 102,673 of which resulted in expulsion.
No policies have been changed that would make the borders more open, said Michelle Mittelstadt, spokesperson for the Migration Policy Institute.
The claim that the U.S.-Mexico border is completely open is False.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/02/gateway-pundit/us-southern-border-completely-open-s-false/