South Dakota's embattled attorney general Jason Ravnsborg admits to reading Joe Biden conspiracy theories on his phone moments before fatally striking a pedestrian with his car.

Detectives examined Ravnsborg's phone records and found that he logged into his Yahoo! email account at 10:20 p.m. on Sept. 12, and moments later was viewing an article on the Dakota Free Press website.

A minute later Ravnsborg went to the Real Clear Politics website, and a minute after that -- moments before he struck and killed 55-year-old Joe Boever -- he was viewing an article about Biden on disgraced reporter John Solomon's Just The News website. ..........(more)

https://www.rawstory.com/jason-ravnsborg-2650812730/?

(Detroit Metro Times) A neo-Nazi terrorist group was planning to create a heavily armed, white nationalist compound in the Upper Peninsula to wage a race war.

The plan was hatched by Justin Watkins, 25, a former leader of the Base, a militant, pro-Hitler movement that advocates violence against non-white people, according to secret chats obtained by VICE News.

In early 2020, Watkins said the plan was to buy, occupy and fortify land in the U.P., which he described as a virtual “white-ethnostate” because of its racial makeup.

"We are buying houses and land and fortifying them,” said Watkins under an alias on the encrypted chat app, Wire, in early 2020. “Land is cheap [...] I’m setting up a community up there. Going to have houses set up to get guys moved in and situated.” .............(more)

https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2021/02/25/neo-nazis-planned-to-establish-white-nationalist-compound-in-michigans-upper-peninsula#.YDkRpf8SCc4.link

(Guardian UK) Millions of people in the US are drinking water that fails to meet federal health standards, including by violating limits for dangerous contaminants.

Latinos are disproportionately exposed, according to the Guardian’s review of more than 140,000 public water systems across the US and county-level demographic data.

Water systems in counties that are 25% or more Latino are violating drinking water contamination rules at twice the rate of those in the rest of the country.

America’s worst public water systems – those that have accrued more than 15 “violation points” for breaking standards over five years – serve more than 25m Americans, the research shows. An estimated 5.8m of these are Latino. .............(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/26/worst-us-water-systems-latinos-most-exposed

More Shifts in the Year of the Plague: Driving Plunged even as Mass Transit Ridership Collapsed
by Wolf Richter • Feb 25, 2021 •

“L-shaped recovery” for mass transit. Per person, vehicle miles were already in long-term decline since 2003. Than came 2020.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.


Total motor vehicle travel on all roads and streets in the US – by private and commercial vehicles, including delivery vehicles, over-the-road trucks and rideshare vehicles – dropped by 13.2%, or by 430 billion vehicle miles driven, in the year 2020, by far the largest drop in the data going back to the 1990s, according to the Federal Highway Administration today:



The enormous shifts of the Pandemic.

This plunge was caused by the shift to working from home and learning from home, and by the acceleration of shopping online instead of driving to the mall, and by the massive unemployment crisis that further reduced commuting, and by the restrictions to socializing and driving to restaurants and bars and concerts and ballgames.

Total motor vehicle travel on all roads and streets in December 2020 fell by 10.3% from December 2019, which brought the total for the year to 2,830 billion vehicle miles driven, the lowest since 2001.

And the drop in 2020 makes the declines during the Great Recession, which had caused so much hand-wringing at the time, look minuscule. From the peak at the time in 2007 through the trough in 2011, over these four years, total miles driven dropped by only 2.6%. .................(more)

https://wolfstreet.com/2021/02/25/vehicle-miles-driven-2020-pandemic-plunge-mass-transit-abandoned/

(Detroit Free Press) Jodi Schumaker cried while she drove north on Interstate-75 through Kentucky on Tuesday afternoon, feeling defeated as she headed home to Michigan without getting a COVID-19 vaccine.

Her hopes had been crushed by bad weather that delayed coronavirus vaccine shipments all over the U.S., including the delivery to the Walmart store in Mississippi where she and her husband had appointments Monday to get shots.

"I just want to get back home in our bubble, safe again until I can find yet another place to get vaccinated," said Schumaker, 53, of Independence Township.

Schumaker's hunt for a coronavirus vaccine is centered almost entirely on her husband, David, who is 60, paraplegic, has diabetes, high blood pressure, and congestive heart failure. ....................(more)

https://www.freep.com/story/news/health/2021/02/26/coronavirus-vaccine-michigan-appointments/4566472001/

Conservatives are the new "good Germans," enabling and defending Trump's crimes
Whatever "conservative" once meant in American politics, it's now just a flimsy rhetorical shield for fascism

By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
FEBRUARY 26, 2021 10:50AM


(Salon) Let me pose a riddle of sorts.

Donald Trump is a force of political, human, moral and economic destruction. He is the leader of an American neofascist and white supremacist movement. Today's Republican Party has fully become an extension of his political cult and crime family.

Trump incited a lethal attack on the Capitol as part of a larger plot to overthrow American democracy. Although Trump was defeated by Joe Biden at the polls, he actually received 10 million more votes than he did in 2016. This is a historic level of support, only surpassed by the 81 million votes Biden received in the same election. Biden may be president of the United States now, but Donald Trump is now positioning himself as a shadow president.

....(snip)....

The most benign and generous understanding of "conservative," in the traditional context of American politics, is drawn (however loosely) from the 18th-century Anglo-Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke. It signifies an aversion to change, or perhaps even a belief that change, when necessary, should be gradual. "Conservative," at least in that conventional context, denotes a respect for stability, tradition and existing societal norms and institutions.

Donald Trump, his movement and its allies have almost no relationship to that tradition, and overwhelmingly reject such values. In the Age of Trump, American democracy is under assault by neofascism, white supremacy, authoritarianism, gangster capitalism and other antisocial values and beliefs. ..........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2021/02/26/conservatives-are-the-new-good-germans-enabling-and-defending-trumps-crimes/

Does New York Really Need an All-Night Subway?
In May, the MTA halted the system’s famous 24-hour subway service, running late-night “ghost trains” without passengers. Riders say it’s time to get back on board.

By John Surico
February 25, 2021, 10:02 AM EST Updated on February 25, 2021, 5:38 PM EST




(Bloomberg CityLab) A few weeks ago, I committed what many consider to be a cardinal sin in New York City’s transit community (aside from saying you just bought a car): I went on Twitter and questioned the city’s long-mythic 24-hour subway service.

Among New Yorkers, the fact that the city’s trains run all night, every day, is an oft-invoked point of pride. Like many only-in-New-York phenomena, this does not happen only in New York: Rapid transit systems in Copenhagen and Chicago, along with several other cities, also have 24/7 service. But when the Covid-19 pandemic led New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to stop serving passengers overnight in May, many locals recognized the significance of this interruption: For the first time in the system’s 117-year history — outside of disasters like Hurricane Sandy and 9/11, or transit strikes — Gotham’s turnstiles went silent.

MTA officials have said that the four-hour break between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. was needed to give crews time to disinfect each train and station, and they fully intend to restore 24/7 service once the pandemic “is over” — a line repeated by Governor Andrew Cuomo, who ordered the shutdown after calling the conditions and images of homeless passengers sleeping in trains “disgusting.”

But critics of the closure have been skeptical, and some fear that this short-term Covid adaptation could wind up becoming permanent. They’ve argued that the service stoppage is merely “hygiene theater” that inconveniences frontline workers and may be aimed mostly at removing the estimated 2,000 homeless New Yorkers who take to subways instead of streets or shelters. ..............(more)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-25/inside-the-debate-over-nyc-s-24-7-subway-service?srnd=premium

https://twitter.com/francismmaxwell/status/1365087912430247938?s=20

A Florida man who allegedly used a pair of scissors to cut off his wife’s lover’s penis claims he “blacked out” during the attack, a report said.

Alex Bonilla, 51, is set to plead guilty Thursday to charges of kidnapping, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for the July 2019 attack in the victim’s mobile home in Bell, the Smoking Gun reported.

Bonilla barged into the victim’s home, and threatened him with a handgun and a metal pipe. He tied up the man in his bedroom, and said, “You are not going to die, but you are going to have something to remember this for your whole life,” according to the outlet. ..........(more)

https://nypost.com/2021/02/25/man-in-florida-used-scissors-to-cut-off-his-wifes-lovers-penis/

https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1365012753589686279?s=20