Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, ousted the 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) earlier this week in a stunning move that shocked medical experts. He defended his action in an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum, claiming that “97% of the people on the committee had conflicts of interest.”
He repeated falsehoods about vaccines that were immediately fact checked by doctors on social media platform X. He falsely claimed there were between 69 and 92 mandatory vaccines in the U.S. today and that most of the vaccines, excluding the COVID-19 vaccine, had not gone through safety tests.
“So nobody has any idea what the risk profiles are on these products, and we don’t know whether they have anything to do with the epidemic of chronic disease,” Kennedy said, presenting no evidence for his claims.
On Monday, Secretary of Health (sick) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. removed all 17 members of the vaccine advisory committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
RFK Jr. said in a statement, “A clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science. ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) new members will prioritize public health and evidence-based medicine. The Committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas.”
RFK Jr. is a rubber stamp for conspiracy theories.
The American Medical Association said Kennedy’s decision undermines “trust and upends a transparent process that has saved countless lives.”
In 2019, RFK Jr. engaged in spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation that helped spread a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed at least 83 people, mostly babies, in that nation.
RFK Jr is an agent of bullshit and only an insane person would listen to him, less enough, put him in charge of the nation’s health. (snip-MORE, and it’s really good!)
June 15, 1917 Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested and charged with conspiracy to obstruct the draft for America’s recent declaration of war with Germany in World War I. They held a number of rallies to discourage young men vulnerable to the new draft from cooperating. They laid out their position in the nearly 100,000 fliers they distributed with their NoConscription League Manifesto. “. . . this democratic country makes no such provision for those who will not commit murder at the behest of the war profiteers. Thus the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’ is ready to coerce free men into the military yoke.” The Emma Goldman Papers The No-Conscription League Manifesto Alexander Berkman biography
June 15, 1942 The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded in Chicago by a group of students including James Farmer and Bayard Rustin. They found inspiration in Mahatma Gandhi—and his nonviolent victory over British colonial rule of India—for their struggle to achieve full legal rights for African Americans. CORE history Read more about CORE
June 15, 1966 The James Meredith March Against Fear [see June 6, 1966] arrived in Granada, Mississippi, and was met by hundreds of members of the local Negro (African-American) community. A rally was then held in the town square to encourage voter registration. During the rally, a representative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) placed a small American flag on a Confederate War Memorial (it was later removed, considered a desecration by the local white population). Grenada County had recently hired four Negro voter registrars and, following the rally, and again following a speech that night by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., ßhundreds lined up at the courthouse to register to vote, 160 just on this day, a total of 1300 over the next two. Shortly thereafter, however, the Negro registrars were fired, and 700 registrations were invalidated for alleged technical violations of the local ordinance.
June 15, 1970 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Sisson that conscientious objectors, those who refuse military service or to bear arms for moral or religious reasons, need not base their beliefs on the tenets of an organized religion. Visit the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors
June 15, 2011 Three months after the meltdown at the local nuclear power plant, the Fukushima, Japan, city government announced it would give dosimeters (devices that measure the intensity of radiation) to 34,000 preschool, elementary and junior high school students.
I am sorry I am posting so many videos and cartoon memes. The issue is my cataracts are so bad one of my eyes is no longer working and my glasses are useless. I saw an eye doctor on Tuesday and when Ron gets back we will have a talk about surgery. It will have to be done on both eyes. What bothers me is the last time I was under for surgery they had a hard time bring me back. My breathing got too shallow and … well it took them a lot longer than they expected to bring me back to consciousness. I am worried if I go under again … I may stay there. But it is a struggle to do anything on the computer now. All the letters are made of fuzzy caterpillars and things I look at even with my glasses have fur on them. But I need my glasses for the computer, phone, and watch but can’t wear them for anything else. So I can take them off for bigger things like watching videos, moving around doing things, even driving. Just need them for reading and typing which gives me a headache after a bit. Hugs.
Federal officials have begun carrying out President Donald Trump’s orders to enforce a World War II-era criminal law that requires virtually all non-citizens in the country to register with and submit fingerprints to the government.
Since April, law enforcement in Louisiana, Arizona, Montana, Alabama, Texas and Washington, D.C., have charged people with willful “failure to register” under the Alien Registration Act, an offense most career federal public defenders have never encountered before. Many of those charged were already in jail and in ongoing deportation proceedings when prosecutors presented judges with the new charges against them.
The registration provision in the law, which was passed in 1940 amid widespread public fear about immigrants’ loyalty to the U.S., had been dormant for 75 years, but it is still on the books. Failure to register is considered a “petty offense” — a misdemeanor with maximum penalties of six months imprisonment or a $1,000 fine.
In reviving the law, the Trump administration may put undocumented immigrants in a catch-22. If they register, they must hand over detailed, incriminating information to the federal government — including how and when they entered the country. But knowingly refusing to register is also a crime, punishable by arrest or prosecution, on top of the ever-present threat of deportation.
“The sort of obvious reason to bring back registration in the first place is the hope that people will register, and therefore give themselves up effectively to the government because they already confessed illegal entry,” said Jonathan Weinberg, a Wayne State University law professor who has studied the registration law.
But the Trump administration also has another goal. It says one purpose of the registration regime is to provoke undocumented immigrants to choose a third option: leave the country voluntarily, or, in the words of the Department of Homeland Security, compulsory “mass self-deportation.” Those efforts, alongside the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and a more aggressive approach to immigration raids, are meant to achieve a broader, overarching campaign promise: the largest deportation program in the history of America.
“For decades, this law has been ignored — not anymore,” the department said in a February announcement that it would enforce the law. The department called “mass self-deportation” a “safer path for aliens and law enforcement,” and said it saves U.S. taxpayer dollars.
The Department of Homeland Security did not answer questions about its enforcement policies.
A long dormant law will now affect millions
The Alien Registration Act was passed in 1940, amid fears about immigrants’ loyalties. A separate provision of the statute criminalizes advocacy for overthrowing the government. For about two decades, that provision was used to prosecute people who were accused of being either pro-fascist or pro-Communist.
The registration provision, though, remained largely dormant, and had not been enforced in 75 years. It applies to non-citizens, regardless of legal status, who are in the U.S. for 30 days or longer.
Certain categories of legal immigrants have already met the requirement. Immigrants who have filed applications to become permanent residents are considered registered by DHS, for example. And even some undocumented U.S. residents are already registered: U.S. residents who have received “parole” — a form of humanitarian protection from deportation — are also considered registered.
Still, DHS estimates that up to 3.2 million immigrants are currently unregistered and are affected by the new enforcement regime. The administration has created a new seven-page form that non-citizens must use. The form requires people, under penalty of perjury, to provide biographical details, contact information, details about any criminal history and the circumstances of how they entered the U.S.
After DHS issued regulations to enforce the registration requirement in April, the administration announced that 47,000 undocumented immigrants had registered using the new form.
A legal challenge and a series of prosecutions
The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and other advocacy groups filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s move to revive the registration requirement in March.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, initially expressed skepticism toward the administration, saying in a recent hearing that officials had pulled a “big switcheroo” on undocumented immigrants. But McFadden in April refused the plaintiffs’ request to temporarily block the policy, saying the Coalition likely lacks the legal standing to sue because it has not shown that it would be harmed by the policy. The group has appealed McFadden’s decision.
In the meantime, the administration has begun to prosecute people for failure to register for the first time in seven decades.
The prosecutions so far have stumbled.
On May 19, a federal magistrate judge in Louisiana consolidated and dismissed five of the criminal cases, saying prosecutors had no probable cause to believe the defendants had intentionally refused to register.
Judge Michael North wrote that the Alien Registration Act requires “some level of subjective knowledge or bad intent” behind the choice not to register. The prosecutions, the judge wrote, are impermissible because most people are simply unaware of the law, and the government “did not provide these Defendants — as well as millions of similarly situated individuals here without government permission — with a way to register” since 1950.
But North also pointed out that the government may have an easier path to proving probable cause in the future, given that DHS created a new registration form in April. And government attorneys have appealed the five dismissed cases.
The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana declined to comment on recent charges filed under the law.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said the office “is aggressively pursuing criminals in the district and will use all criminal justice resources available to make D.C. safe and to carry out President Trump’s and Attorney General Bondi’s direction to support immigration enforcement.”
The other federal district attorneys whose offices filed charges did not respond to a request for comment.
Michelle LaPointe, legal director at the American Immigration Council, an immigrants’ rights advocacy group, said these initial cases are the “tip of the iceberg.” LaPointe is among the attorneys representing the Coalition in its lawsuit against the administration.
“I don’t expect them to abate just because there were some dismissals,” LaPointe said, pointing to North’s statements about future charges. “They have already stated that they intend to make prosecution of the few immigration-related criminal statutes a priority for DOJ, and it’s very easy for them to at least charge, even if they’re not always gonna be able to sustain their burden to secure a conviction.”
Weinberg, the Wayne State law professor, agreed that the administration will likely continue attempting broad enforcement.
“If they bring a whole lot of prosecutions and end up losing all, they may step back,” Weinberg said. “If they bring a whole lot and win a few, they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s the basis on which we can move further’” and appeal — potentially all the way to the Supreme Court, he noted.
Melissa Hortman has died. John Hoffman and his wife have survived surgery.
Here is a fast post before I take a breath, make my signs, and go outside to scream my head off.
Someone or someones dressed as law enforcement — or law enforcement! with ICE covering their faces, there’s really no way to know anymore who is who! — has gone and shot Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota. The Minnesota House is split 67-67, and the Minnesota Senate has a plus-one majority for Democratic-Farm-Labor. These are targeted assassinations.
Sen. John Hoffman (DFL-Champlin) and Minnesota House DFL Leader Melissa Hortman of Brooklyn Park are reportedly in grave condition. Reportedly, both of their spouses were shot too. Update 10:50 eastern:KSTP is reporting that Hortman and her husband Mark have died.
Update 11:00 eastern: Per an officer at the press conference above, officers responding to the shooting at Hoffman’s house asked Brooklyn Park officers to go check Hortman’s house — out of a vague foreboding. Those officers found the fake cop coming out of her house, when he immediately shot at them and went back inside.
Update 11:30 eastern: NOWHERE in this CNN story on the “politically motivated assassination” does it tell its readers that the victims were Democrats. Why do you suppose that is?
Everything is escalating. Nothing is all right.
The last time someone tried to kill Democrats, it was a lunatic who bashed Nancy Pelosi’s octogenarian husband in the head with a hammer. This was considered very hilarious by our president, Donald Trump.
Scottie's Playtime 