September 15, 2021

Eric Boehlert: Zero lessons learned --New York Times gives GOP a pass on election lies

Zero lessons learned —New York Times gives GOP a pass on election lies
Words matter
Eric Boehlert
1 hr ago

snip//

Last winter, even as Trump actively tried to engineer the open theft of a presidential contest, and held White House discussions with deranged, conspiracy-peddling advisers, news outlets kept producing ho-hum updates about Trump’s “tactics,” his vague “moves” and “chicanery”; his “quixotic” legal “strategy,” and how he was “sulking” and “brooding” inside the White House. One Politico dispatch even dismissed Trump’s erratic post-election behavior as little more than “bad sportsmanship."

Except that “chicanery” and “bad sportsmanship” soon led to a deadly coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol, as violent Trump fanatics tried to overturn the election results.

The Times California recall article last week was a textbook example in how not to cover obvious blatant lies, but at least the report addressed them. Days later, in its California recall election page-one finale, the paper made no mention of the fact that the leading Republican candidate in the race was actively spreading doubt about the election results being trustworthy. Somehow that did not garner a single mention.

The Times has hardly been alone in falling down on this story. The Washington Post recently announced, “California’s Recall Becomes the New Epicenter of Unfounded Fraud Claims,” and refused to call the lies “lies.” CNN highlighted “voter fraud fabrications” in California, “baseless election fraud claims,” and “debunked claims.”

This media malfeasance — the downplaying —unfolds as stunned scholars warn us that Republicans are putting American democracy at risk with their unprecedented and brazen attacks on free and fair elections.

more...

https://pressrun.media/p/zero-lessons-learned-latest-gop-election

September 15, 2021

Democratic Combat Vet Running Against Madison Cawthorn Calls Him A Traitor

https://www.politicususa.com/2021/09/14/democratic-combat-vet-running-against-madison-cawthorn-calls-him-a-traitor.html


Posted on Tue, Sep 14th, 2021 by Jason Easley
Democratic Combat Vet Running Against Madison Cawthorn Calls Him A Traitor
Josh Remillard, a combat veteran and Democrat running against Rep. Madison Cawthorn, called insurrection inciter a traitor.



Remillard said:



Josh Remillard is one of a number of Democrats who are vying to face Cawthorn next year.

Remillard lived in foster care, was adopted by his grandparents, and then served his country in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His patriotism and willingness to defend his country has already been proven in war, and if he becomes the Democratic nominee, he will offer voters in North Carolina’s 11th District the choice between a combat vet and a domestic terrorist.

September 14, 2021

Florida woman faces five years in prison for threatening to kill {Vice President} Harris

Florida woman faces five years in prison for threatening to kill Harris
By Cameron Jenkins - 09/14/21 09:37 AM EDT



A former Florida nurse is facing five years in prison after pleading guilty to threatening to kill Vice President Kamala Harris.

Niviane Petit Phelps, a mother of three, made multiple threats to Harris's life just days after she and President Biden were sworn into office. She created and sent several videos to her husband in prison in which she said she was paid to kill Harris and that the vice president's "days are numbered."

She was arrested in April after a criminal complaint was filed against her. On Friday, Phelps pleaded guilty to six counts of making threats against the vice president, according to the Washington Post.

more...

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/572115-florida-woman-faces-five-years-in-prison-for-threatening-to-kill-harris

September 14, 2021

US steps up effort to unite families separated under Trump

US steps up effort to unite families separated under Trump
By BEN FOX


WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is expanding its effort to find and reunite migrant families who were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border under President Donald Trump as part of a zero-tolerance policy on illegal crossings.

A federal task force is launching a new program Monday that officials say will expand efforts to find parents, many of whom are in remote Central American communities, and help them return to the United States, where they will get at least three years of legal residency and other assistance.



The new program, which includes a contract with the International Organization for Migration to help with the often-complex task of getting expelled migrants back to the U.S., is a reflection of just how difficult it has been for President Joe Biden’s administration to address a chapter in U.S. immigration history that drew widespread condemnation.

more...

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-mexico-united-states-immigration-central-america-cc07fbfe2ef379517683e79023baca47

September 14, 2021

Anti-Vaxxers Are Now Gargling Iodine to Prevent Covid-19

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/betadine-anti-vaxxer-covid-treatment-iodine-1225438/

September 13, 2021 6:16PM ET
Anti-Vaxxers Are Now Gargling Iodine to Prevent Covid-19
One ER doc’s response to the new trend: “Fuck me! Of course they are”
By EJ Dickson


As if attempting to one-up last week’s stupidity with regards to ivermectin, anti-vaxxers on Facebook and Twitter are advocating for a new and unproven Covid-19 treatment: Betadine, an antiseptic used to treat cuts and scrapes.

Povidone iodine, often sold under the brand-name Betadine, is an iodine-based treatment largely for topical use that kills bacteria. It’s a “commonly used cleanser in the ER and OR,” says Kenneth Weinberg, an emergency room physician in New York City. “If you’re in the ER and someone has a wound to sew it up, you use it to clean with.” When told that anti-vaxxers had taken to gargling with Betadine, Weinberg said, “Fuck me! Of course they are.”

Solutions that include povidone iodine have also previously been marketed as a vaginal douche to treat itching in some countries. “We use it before surgery to clean the vagina,” says OB/GYN Dr. Jennifer Gunter. “The reason it is bad in douches is that it kills the good bacteria and can be an irritant.”

Betadine is mostly intended for external use, as it can result in iodine poisoning if taken orally, says Gunter. But on social media, people are promoting it as a means of warding off the Covid-19 virus, either by gargling it or using it in a nasal spray. “Don’t get Covid. Prophylaxis is not that hard,” one person touting themselves as an ER doctor tweeted in a post that racked up almost 300 shares, along with a photo of various supplements, including melatonin and vitamin D (none of which have been proven to effectively prevent against Covid-19). “Also nasal spray with a couple of drops betadine in it. And gargle with original Listerine.” Another poster on Facebook wrote, “Gargling, nasal spray and eye drops with 1 percent providone iodine (betadine) results in dramatically better outcomes with Covid infections. I do this every time I’ve been exposed.” (This particular poster cites a 2020 paper written by a Bangladeshi plastic surgeon, one of several that investigates this question, to support this view.)

Betadine does make a diluted product, sold as a gargle to treat sore throat symptoms. But the manufacturers specifically state that it is not intended for ingestion, and that “Betadine Antiseptic products” — including the gargle — “have not been demonstrated to be effective for the treatment or prevention of Covid-19 or any other viruses.”

Needless to say, the side effects of ingesting Betadine can be nasty. Weinberg said that when he was doing his residency, he treated a patient who went into kidney failure after drinking iodine and had to be on dialysis (he eventually recovered, but only after he’d started urinating reddish-brown). “I’m sure it would cause all kinds of GI symptoms as well if you ate or drank enough of it,” he says. When asked if gargling Betadine could reduce the effects of Covid-19 or prevent transmission, Weinberg said, “Fuck no.”

September 14, 2021

Texas Embalmer Shares Nightmare COVID Experiences: 'Unlike Anything I've Seen Before'

Not for the faint of heart.

HUFFPOST PERSONAL
09/13/2021 09:08 am ET Updated 10 hours ago
Texas Embalmer Shares Nightmare COVID Experiences: ‘Unlike Anything I’ve Seen Before’
“I don’t know how much longer I can keep working this way,” the funeral professional told HuffPost.
By Noah Michelson

snip//

We’ve just had to buckle down and do the best that we can. The internet has been a blessing because it allows all of us embalmers to communicate and find out what issues everyone is having because so much of this has been unlike anything we’ve seen before. We get bodies out of ICU regularly, but not in the condition that these COVID bodies are in. They’re tremendously swollen. If they’ve been on a ventilator, that often completely runs down their immune system. It also opens them up to a lot of sepsis and secondary infections that tend to hang around hospitals, like penicillin-resistant staph infections.

These folks were so swollen they were completely unrecognizable. We were also getting sent a lot of people who had died from COVID in nursing homes back at that time, and many of them had not been dead very long at all. Generally when we embalm, we utilize a major artery to inject the embalming fluid and we use its adjoining vein for drainage. The blood tends to settle out because it’s no longer flowing and it’ll gravitate to the dependent part of the body. The longer a body sits, the more blood clots that they develop. I was having people that had only been dead for a few hours and there were major clotting issues. The clots were the size of pancakes ― you never, never see those with someone who didn’t die of COVID.

I’ve been doing this for 30 years and pretty much everywhere I’ve worked has been medium to high volume. I’m not one of those embalmers that works at a place that just does 50 or 60 bodies a year. So I’ve done this long enough and I’ve seen enough that I would know when something different pops up. COVID is unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Many of the people who were in the ICU were on ventilators, and they put adhesive patches on their cheeks. They can easily become septic and they drip that septic saliva on the sides of their faces and the skin in that area gets infected. We were literally receiving bodies with huge lesions on their cheeks or [patches that had gone] gangrene. The sad part is the families of these people, at that point, hadn’t been allowed to see their loved ones during the several weeks that they were in the ICU. So the body comes out in an almost unrecognizable condition, and then you have to explain to their family that their loved one doesn’t look anything like what they should.

Despite the fact that I specialize in postmortem reconstruction ― accidents, trauma, stuff like that ― when the bodies are that swollen, there is very little I can do to eliminate that. And for a lot of these families, it’s just a tremendous shock. I’ve had husbands and wives die within days of each other. I’ve seen entire families wiped out. It’s horrible.

more...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/texas-covid-embalmers-patrick-huey_n_612feb0be4b0aac9c012139c

September 13, 2021

Forget About Biden's 'Cruel Summer'--He's Doing Big Things

Forget About Biden’s ‘Cruel Summer’—He’s Doing Big Things
ALTERNATE REALITY
He’s ended America’s longest war, got vaccines distributed at no cost nationwide and halved the child poverty rate. So why all the stories about ‘Biden‘s Cruel Summer’?
David Rothkopf
Bernard Schwartz
Updated Sep. 13, 2021 10:29AM ET / Published Sep. 13, 2021 10:18AM ET


We are both old enough to remember a time when you picked up the newspaper in the morning or turned on the television news to find out what was happening in the world. Now, it is not that simple.

Opinion, spin, misguided attempts at “objectivity” that produce false equivalencies, the partisanship of some media outlets and a herd mentality in the press have made it difficult to know where the facts end and the truth begins. When untrue or misleading narratives emerge, they can take on a life of their own and have serious real world consequences—shifting the political landscape, remaking polls, changing how subsequent developments are viewed or even impacting whether and how they take place.

This has seldom been made more clear than in the recent treatment of President Biden in the media. Not only has much of it been divorced from reality, misguided, or twisted, but the real world implications of the narratives that have emerged in the past several weeks could have lasting negative ramifications for the country.

The facts of Biden’s presidency are there for all of us to see. When he took office, Biden inherited a country in the midst of a pandemic and an economic crisis, reeling from an unprecedented attack on its political system and wracked by social divisions the last president systematically sought to make worse. Our international standing had been battered by racist policies, nationalist, anti-immigrant rhetoric, attacks on our allies, corruption, efforts to undermine international institutions, embrace of our enemies and rejection of our own core democratic values.

In just eight months, the president and his team have engineered transformational progress on many fronts. Where there had been no plan to administer vaccines, today over 200 million Americans have received at least one shot and the vaccines are available to every American free of charge and are now required of federal workers as part of a sweeping effort to contain the spread of the virus here. Our vaccine diplomacy efforts lead the world, with commitments to share 600 million doses to countries in need worldwide. Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan has cut the child poverty rate in half. More jobs, 4.1 million, were created in the first six months of this administration than in the 12 years of the Trump and Bush administrations combined. The U.S. economy grew at an extraordinary annualized rate of 6.5 percent during the second quarter of this year. Biden implemented scores of executive orders undoing Trump administration policies that damaged the environment, put our security at risk or violated the rights of Americans.

more/sorry, pay wall...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bidens-achievements-are-big-his-press-coverage-is-small?ref=home

September 13, 2021

Long-Secret FBI Report Reveals New Connections Between 9/11 Hijackers and Saudi Religious Officials

Long-Secret FBI Report Reveals New Connections Between 9/11 Hijackers and Saudi Religious Officials in U.S.
“This validates what we have been saying,” says an attorney for families of 9/11 victims who are suing the Saudi government over alleged support of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
by Tim Golden and Sebastian Rotella
Sept. 12, 6:50 p.m. EDT
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.


A long-suppressed FBI report on Saudi Arabia’s connections to the 9/11 plot has revealed that Saudi religious officials stationed in the United States had more significant connections to two of the hijackers than has been previously known.

The 2016 report was released late Saturday night under an executive order from President Joe Biden, who promised to make it public no later than the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks that killed 2,977 people and injured more than 6,000 others. The 16-page document was a final inventory of circumstantial evidence and leads from the FBI’s investigation of Saudi ties to the plot; it was heavily redacted.

Nonetheless, lawyers for families of the 9/11 victims, who are suing the Saudi kingdom in federal court, said the document provided important support to their theory that a handful of Saudis connected to their government worked in concert to assist the first two Qaida hijackers sent to the United States in January 2000.



more...

https://www.propublica.org/article/long-secret-fbi-report-reveals-new-connections-between-9-11-hijackers-and-saudi-religious-officials-in-u-s

September 13, 2021

Eric Boehlert: Fox News brainwashes anti-vaxxers -- and the press blames Biden

Fox News brainwashes anti-vaxxers — and the press blames Biden
Stop whitewashing
Eric Boehlert
59 min ago


Busy extending the list of “crises” that President Joe Biden must face, the Beltway media are busy adding Covid vaccinations as a looming failure for the Democrat, as the nation readies a national mandate for the inoculations.

By putting the onus on Biden for the millions of defiant Trump voters who refuse to take the free, safe, and effective shot even as their neighbors become sick and die around them, the press is boosting the GOP — and missing a huge story.

We’re witnessing one of the great mass brainwashings in American political history, as millions of Fox News Covid zombies eagerly swallow an ocean of lies, distortions, and misinformation. Yet the press blames Biden for not being able to convince them otherwise. Worse, the press blames the president without ever acknowledging the large-scale brainwashing that is happening.

Uncomfortable with reporting on a conservative movement that has lost touch with reality, the Beltway media are much more comfortable treating the vaccine story as one about a Democratic president who’s failing to properly communicate and persuade. And one who’s being outmaneuvered by Republicans.

snip//

Virtually every reporter is working from the same script: Covid is surging and deaths are up because of Biden’s “inability” to persuade vaccine “skeptics.” What the Times report never addressed, and virtually none of them ever do, is that the reason millions of Americans still won’t get vaccinated is because there is a choreographed, deep-pocketed political and media campaign designed to make sure millions of people don’t get vaccinated. Period.

The press wants us to believe this is all just happening, by chance. It’s not. Biden is battling powerful forces that reject science and are committed to prolonging the pandemic. That’s essential to understand our continued health crisis, yet the press refuses to address it. Holding vaccine dead enders responsible for their actions is just not something they want to do.


more...

https://pressrun.media/p/fox-news-brainwashed-millions-of

September 12, 2021

Trump's 9/11 Statement is a Disgusting Display of Narcissism and an Insult to America

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/9/11/2051662/-Trump-s-9-11-Statement-is-a-Disgusting-Display-of-Narcissism-and-an-Insult-to-America

Trump's 9/11 Statement is a Disgusting Display of Narcissism and an Insult to America
News Corpse
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Saturday September 11, 2021 · 2:11 PM EDT


It's been twenty years since the United States was struck in a tragic act of terrorism. On September 11, 2001, the nation was changed in ways it could not have previously imagined. It was a day of unthinkable loss. But it was also a day that was followed by weeks and months and years of inspiring expressions of heroism, hope, and unity.

On this day of remembrance, four American presidents of both political parties - Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden - came together to pay tribute to those who were lost and those who worked tirelessly and selflessly to save lives and rebuild.

Unfortunately, there is another former president who simply doesn't have the compassion to participate in such displays of empathy and patriotism. On this day Donald Trump released a statement that affirmed his utter absence of the basic human decency that defines America in times of hardship.

Trump's offensive "tribute" to the victims and heroes of 9/11 lasted for about 24 seconds of the video that ran 1:44. He then spent the remainder of his remarks attacking President Biden. He began by blaming Biden for how the war in Afghanistan ended, despite the fact that it was Trump's plan that led to the Taliban's victory. He released 5,000 of their fighters and lifted all of the financial sanctions in what his own National Security Advisor lambasted as a “surrender agreement”.

Here's a taste of Trump's self-serving and anti-American ranting on a day that should be a solemn occasion (posted here by his spokes-shill, if you have the stomach for it):



So Trump thought it would be appropriate on this somber occasion to call our President a fool. He soiled the seriousness of the day with his jealousy and bitterness because Biden was able to accomplish goals that he could only whine about. And he abandoned any effort to uplift the nation, instead fixating on the "embarrassment" and "incompetence" that he caused, but which he is impotently projecting onto Biden.

Also on this day, Trump thought it would be appropriate to "honor" its memory by partying with his boxing pals as he serves as the featured commentator for an exhibition match at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida. For fifty bucks a pop Trump is turning this anniversary into another opportunity to fleece his cult disciples.

By contrast, President Biden is visiting all three sites that were struck on 9/11. He is paying his respects to the fallen, their families, and those who sacrificed in rescue, recovery and rebuilding efforts. Biden also released a statement that should put Trump to shame (if he were capable of it). Biden said in part that...



The differences between Biden's respectful and hopeful message, and Trump's selfish, envious, and hate-filled harangue, could not be more distinct. But it is also no more than we expect from a lying, unpatriotic, greedy, sociopathic, narcissist, who couldn't care less about this country or its people.